Portside

While teachers led their classrooms, a judge in a Los Angeles courtroom said that for students to win, teachers have to lose. If we want every child to have a chance to thrive, we must retain and support a stable teaching force-especially in high-poverty schools. By attacking the rules that protect and support teachers, the "Vergara "decision destabilizes public education.

When teachers at the Perelman Jewish Day School in Montgomery County were told in March that the private religious academy would no longer recognize their 60-member union, they filed a federal labor complaint - and then they went to a higher authority.

The teachers agreement agreement, which was passed with more than 77 percent of the roughly 90,000 votes cast and includes billions of dollars in back pay, is likely to set the standard for several other municipal unions that, like the teachers’ union, were left without contracts in the final years of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration.

Critics say that charter schools—publicly funded but run by private organizations—are being used as a means to privatize public education at the expense of the vast majority of students. They say the charter movement is a Trojan-horse riding under the guise of school choice, used as an instrument to break teachers unions.

For New Orleans, the debate over charter schools and teachers unions has always been an either-or proposition. The Orleans Parish School Board voided the city’s union contract after Hurricane Katrina, and charter schools began taking over rapidly thereafter. Now, New Orleans is beginning to find out if this hard divide between charters and unions is really necessary, or if the two can somehow learn to coexist.

Collective bargaining is under attack from right-wing, anti-union politicians. But union members are fighting back - pushing new boundaries in what unions do and challenging the notion of "management prerogatives." The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers’ recent contract campaign is an impressive example of this new direction in collective bargaining.

Wisconsin was the first state to grant public-sector unions the right to negotiate contracts. Before Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed that law in 1959, only unionized workers in private companies had a government-protected right to bargain collectively. The Wisconsin idea soon spread around the country. Act 10 is an about-face, and Gov. Walker and his Republican supporters see it as a tough-minded strategy that other states can follow. History repeating itself, if in reverse.