I know a woman who was fired from a charter school for the offense of telling her colleagues how much UFT teachers made. Despite the fact that she’d received uniformly excellent observations, her supervisors didn’t hesitate to vilify her to the press. I know another who was fired along with the whole staff, freaking out parents who liked the teachers better than administration. Some charters are better than unionized schools and some are not.

Green Dot, of course, is welcomed by union opponents because its teachers have neither tenure nor seniority. They have a “just cause” clause that’s supposed to be utilized before dismissal, but no one, not working news reporters, not education analysts, not even the UFT (its new partner), has been able to provide me with a single example of its being utilized, let alone saving the job of a working teacher.

Working people in America still have a right to unionize, and anyone who thinks it’s bad for children is clearly not counting on them to grow up, when they’ll need unions as much as the rest of us. The trend toward privatization has been a disaster for the United States, as anyone who’s opened a newspaper over the last few months is painfully aware.