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Teachers unionize at Calif. schools led by Rhee

Greg Toppo
USATODAY

Teachers at a small Sacramento, Calif., charter school chain have voted to unionize, the city’s teachers union was due to announce Wednesday. That is not necessarily news. What is news: the schools’ board chair is former Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the famously combative union adversary.

FILE - This Tuesday, April 24, 2012 file photo shows StudentsFirst Founder and CEO Michelle Rhee speaking in San Jose, Calif.

A majority of educators at the schools — including teachers, psychologists and school counselors — agreed to join the Sacramento City Teachers Association. The chain’s four schools employ about 100 teachers, the union said. It noted that 60% of charter school teachers in Sacramento City School District are now unionized. Nationwide, however, only about one in 10 charter school teachers is a union member.

Kinglsey Melton, a law and government teacher at St. HOPE's Sacramento High School, said he voted for unionization to bring more stability to the school.

“Next year I’ll have my seventh principal — and I’ll be in my seventh year,” he said.

Melton said teachers at the school are still waiting for job offers for the upcoming school year, leading many to begin looking elsewhere. And he said evaluations at the school produce more instability, since a single poor rating can either raise or reduce a teacher’s salary by $10,000.

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He said one of his colleagues, a science teacher, earned an unsatisfactory rating after creating a new course, at the school’s request, then received his contract for the fall: "It was for $10,000 less than he’d made the year before," Melton said. "And this is a guy with young kids.”

John Borsos, executive director of the Sacramento Classroom Teachers Association, said principal turnover at the schools is also a problem, with schools run by administrators “who are at the earliest stages of their careers.” More stability may help with recruitment, he said. “It should be in the schools’ interest to be able to recruit and retain a stable, highly qualified professional staff."

State officials have about two weeks to approve the teachers’ petition for representation by the Sacramento union, a local affiliate of the California Teachers Association (CTA).

In a statement provided to USA TODAY, Dominique Amis, St. HOPE’s chief operating officer, said: “The fact the CTA has brought outside media attention to this shows that their priority is on creating national political theatrics. While that's unfortunate, the focus of St. HOPE Public Schools will remain on students and ensuring they get the education they deserve."

Rhee, the schools’ board chair, is also the wife of ex-NBA star Kevin Johnson, a former Sacramento mayor and the charter school network’s founder. She is credited with helping turn around D.C.’s school system, but she clashed repeatedly with teachers and their local union during her brief tenure, from 2007 to 2010, as schools chancellor. Rhee closed dozens of schools, dismissed hundreds of teachers and principals and was often at odds with the Washington Teachers' Union.

In what may be her defining public moment, Rhee in 2007 fired a principal on camera during filming of a PBS documentary on her reforms.

She later told reporter John Merrow that she had no regrets about firing ineffective educators: “I think that when you're doing the kind of work that I'm doing, where the lives and futures of children hang in the balance, you can't play with that. This is not about giving people jobs or ensuring that people can maintain their jobs. This is about educating children.”

After D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in September 2010, Rhee stepped down. A few weeks later, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and announced, “I am going to start a revolution. I'm going to start a movement in this country on behalf of the nation's children.”

Rhee’s new organization, StudentsFirst, hoped to garner 1 million members and raise $1 billion for public schools in its first year, but it later dialed back its goal to $1 billion within five years. StudentsFirst netted $62.8 million total and just $7.6 million in its first year, The Huffington Post reported in 2014. But the group claimed credit for changing more than 130 state education laws.

ORG XMIT: SCA120 Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, left, watches an NBA basketball game between the Sacramento Kings and the Phoenix Suns with his wife, Michelle Rhee, in Sacramento, Calif., Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012.

Rhee stepped down in August 2014 to focus “on my family and supporting my husband.” She took a position as board member of the Ohio-based Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., as well as Sacramento's St. HOPE schools.

Years after leaving D.C., Rhee told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Should I have fired ineffective principals? Absolutely. Should I have done so on national TV? Probably not."

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo

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