How ugly will labor brawls get at charter schools in the city?

Back when I first started working in the news business, I was writing for a suburban newspaper where the reporter-types tried organizing themselves into a union – a chapter of the Newspaper Guild, to be exact.

That was more than a quarter century ago in Chicago Heights, yet I still remember the degree to which newspaper management went out of their way to discourage us from even considering unionization.

THE HARASSING LETTERS we used to get from law firms hired by the ownership telling us we ought to be grateful anybody even considered employing slugs such as ourselves. We were only talented when such skills benefitted management’s concerns.

All the private talks from higher-up editors, trying to make it seem like we’re all buddies who don’t really need unionization and how the reason such “friendship” was threatened was because of us blasted reporter-types who would dare to think we might gain something by sticking together as one.

Along with the harassment that came in the days following our union election defeat – including being told by an editor about the “attitude” I had developed that they were sure I would overcome “somewhere else.”

In all honesty, I have to admit that I wasn’t fired. I kept working there for another two months, and they wound up giving me a top-notch reference that benefitted me into getting into the many years of wire service work that I wound up doing in my news career.

NOW WHY DO I feel compelled to share any of this labor angst I encountered many years ago at a publication that isn’t even in existence any longer?

It’s just the natural memories that pop into my mind whenever I learn of someone deciding they’re going to take on the legal fight of trying to organize themselves into a local chapter of a labor union.

The latest is the announcement by teachers at Urban Prep Academy and North Lawndale College Prep, saying they want to organize themselves by joining the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers. They think they can more fairly be compensated for their work by engaging in collective bargaining to reach a contract for all.

Those teachers are going to get pushback more intense than anything I ever endured, largely because they’re working at charter schools – those outfits that are allowed to set many of their own operating guidelines.

PROPONENTS OF CHARTER schools claim that gives them more flexibility to operate in ways that improve educational quality. Although I’ve always felt the reason those schools have potential to achieve better educational results is because they have small enrollments and can reject the masses that might want to attend there – but for which there is no room.

One of the real reasons that those schools get backing is because many of them are non-union. Many of the proponents of charter schools are more interested in trying to undermine the labor unions that represent school teachers.

Which is why I expect that the people operating those schools are going to put up as much of a legal fight as is possible in order to avoid the prospect of labor unions getting set up there.

I’m sure they’re going to feel like the presence of unions will undermine the very principles upon which charter schools were created!

WHICH IS WHY I’m sure the Chicago Teachers Union was able to enjoy the statement they issued Friday; one expressing “solidarity” with teachers at the two inner-city schools that admittedly try to create an academic attitude amongst their students that prepares them for the possibility of attending a university some day.

“The teachers at these privately-held, publicly-funded charter schools are just as fed up as teachers in our non-charter public schools, and they’re saying they’ve had enough of the top-down bureaucracy,” union President Karen Lewis said. “We strongly support the… teachers in their efforts to unionize to ensure that both they and their students have the resources and environment they need to succeed.”

While those charter school teachers said Friday they hope management immediately recognizes their desires and doesn’t require a secret-ballot election, I’d be surprised if it happened that easily.

More likely, those teachers will be in for a legal brawl that will burn into their brains memories they will vividly recall a quarter-of-a-century from now, along with stories that likely will have them telling me how I “had it easy” when I endured a fight all those years ago.

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A soccer “school” in Chicago? Maybe we are that desperate to boost school quality

A part of me wants to think that the United Neighborhood Organization has come up with a truly dippy idea when it talks of wanting to create a new elementary school in Chicago that would use soccer and athletics as its focus.

The group, which already includes among its activities the operation of nine charter schools in neighborhoods with heavy Latino population where the area public schools have declined so badly that the locals don’t trust them, has plans for yet another charter school.

YET THIS ONE, tentatively proposed for 51^st Street and Homan Avenue in the Southwest Side’s Gage Park neighborhood, would use soccer as a theme.

Students who manage to get accepted to the school through a lottery of area applicants would get soccer as a large part of their physical education requirements, and students would be expected to take part in after-school drills and scrimmages.

Part of the point is to take young people who show some promise with the sport, and give them some intense training so as to develop them as futbol players (I mean real football, not that stupid game the Chicago Bears likely won’t be playing this autumn).

It is not definite if the Chicago Fire professional soccer team will have any involvement with the academy, although team representatives were present, along with some from the University of Illinois at Chicago soccer program, when UNO officials announced their plans earlier this month for a soccer school.

THERE IS ONE other thing that isn’t specific – the academics, although UNO officials insist that students at the soccer school will get a rigorous educational curriculum that will prepare them for high school. If the idea works well enough, UNO may someday use the charter school concept to create a soccer-themed high school that the elementary school would feed into.

Regardless of whether they operate their own high school someday, or merely feed into existing high schools, the point of all this is to prepare students who when they get to high school will take on a college-preparatory academic curriculum to get themselves ready to attend college someday.

That is the key factor, and the one that will decide whether this idea has any merit, or if it really is dippy at heart.

Because UNO officials say they see one goal of this program to prepare Latino neighborhood youth to go to college. By developing their athletic skills, it might make it possible for them to be good enough ballplayers to get the limited athletic scholarships available for the so-called lesser sports.

UNLIKE MEN’S FOOTBALL and basketball programs, many big colleges don’t feel the need to have every single team member on a full-ride scholarship. So one usually has to be a particularly skilled athlete who won’t have problems complying with the academic requirements to be eligible for athletic scholarships to get that full-ride for soccer.

I’m going to be curious to see how academics is integrated into the program. Or, as the Chicago Tribune reported, if the integration ends with the idea of naming school classrooms after the nations of the world that have hosted the World Cup tournament (including the United States in 1994) since it was first created in 1930.

Because it doesn’t do anyone any good to have a young athlete go off to college and flunk out after one year because they couldn’t cut it academically. It is instances such as those that are such a waste, because the sport was allowed to interfere with a person developing themselves to get ahead in life.

And as for those who might want to think that the athletic skills alone are enough to play professionally and set one-self up for life, I have seen too many ballplayers who signed some “big money” contract – only to wind up spending it all too quickly or losing it all through bad investments that they have nothing to show for it.

MY FEAR IS that we may have some Latino youth developing in Chicago who will think that developing the perfect bicycle kick in and of itself is the key to success in life, rather than realizing that developing the kick (along with the more mundane, but necessary, skills of passing and shooting the ball) merely gives them access to the venues (the universities themselves) that will prepare them to succeed in life.

Then again, it’s not like this problem would be limited to the students at this school. I have seen too many teenagers throughout the years, particularly among African-American youth, who are convinced that their ball-handling skills on the basketball court are the be-all and end-all to life.

I have also seen too many who used those skills to get their chance to play college-level basketball, only to fail to take advantage of their time while on a university campus that could help boost themselves as individuals.

I’d hate to think that UNO, a 27-year-old activist group that takes on so many projects to try to improve life in Latino neighborhoods, is going to wind up putting many Latino youths in the same mindset – with the only difference being that they’re creating kids who learn to dribble a ball with their foot, rather than with their fingertips.

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