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Last month, young teachers at the KIPP AMP charter school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn -- widely recognized as a high-achieving school for low-income students -- announced they had collected enough signatures to unionize under the United Federation of Teachers, New York City's AFT affiliate. As I wrote at the time, the ability of KIPP and the UFT to work together at AMP would be a test of whether, at the national level, common ground can be found between free market education reformers and unions. Many charter schools, including the KIPP network, were founded specifically in opposition to union work rules. Their managers consider the ability to hire and fire teachers at will the cornerstone of their success. The KIPP schools also require uncommonly long hours, and have experienced higher than usual teacher turnover.Now the New York Times reports that after initially promising to welcome the union, KIPP's management has pulled back, prompting the UFT to file a complaint of worker intimidation.
...the atmosphere at the school has grown increasingly tense, with administrators making veiled threats about the effect of creating a union. E-mail and text messages that would usually be returned at all hours have gone unanswered. And late last month, teachers said they were told by their students, school administrators pulled students into a private meeting and asked them to critique their teachers.“The general tenor has been of increased distance, and administrators felt more inaccessible than they have ever been,” said Leila Chakravarty, a seventh-grade math teacher who helped collect signatures to form the union.According to the Times, Dave Levin, KIPP's co-founder, has refused to meet with the teachers who led the unionization drive. Levin is also ignoring media requests for interviews, including from The American Prospect. --Dana Goldstein
