Saturday, February 14, 2009

Charter School Does Not Recognize Union

KIPP AMP in Crown Heights, Brooklyn has decided not to recognize the union, and is using intimidation tactics?? What defines intimidation you may ask? This:

"The city’s teachers’ union also filed a complaint with the state’s labor board on Thursday, claiming that the administration intimidated employees at KIPP AMP and used staff meetings to discourage them from forming a union.

According to the complaint, Mr. Levin attended a mandatory staff meeting and said that the teachers’ current retirement, maternity and private pension benefits would be “potentially in jeopardy” and “all of that goes away,” if they formed a union. At the meeting, Mr. Levin distributed a letter with instructions on how to revoke their support for a union, union officials said.

George Arzt, a spokesman for KIPP, said that Mr. Levin was simply responding to inquiries from teachers about their options under state law, and added that the same information was available on the Web site of the state’s labor board."

Read on...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why are unions so incompatible with charter schools? I have often heard the argument that unions protect under-performing teachers, but don't charters have the ability to set criteria and choose their own teachers? There is an inference that charters don't want their teachers to have the same benefits that a teacher in a public school has, that something is wrong with having those benefits. Exactly which benefits are the problem, and are there any solutions other than discouraging unionization? It seems to me that if charter schools were not so hostile to unions, much of the contention about them by
Democrats would disappear.