Whitney Tilson, who blogs on education here , reflects level-headedly in today's New York Daily News on the struggles facing the UFT's charter school . The last paragraph offers a tidy summary of the lessons the UFT, and especially current-UFT-boss and AFT-president-to-be Randi Weingarten, can take away from the experience:
Through its own hard experience with its charter school, the UFT is learning there's a reason why nearly all organizations, both for profit and nonprofit, have managers and employees that are not equals: because the interests of employees are not the same as the interests of the organization. The job of management is to represent the latter, and it needs a significant amount of flexibility in doing so.
Nearly everyone has applauded the UFT for having the chutzpah to stake a claim in the school choice movement, and rightly so. But they've yet to prove that this bold experiment is intended as a true learning experience and not just an effort to co-opt the choice movement and recast it using their own mold. Let's hope that in the months and years ahead they're willing to engage in the kind of serious reflection present in Tilson's op-ed.
(Also, see Eduwonk's take on the school's troubles.)
