It’s certainly no surprise that United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union in Los Angeles Unified, would sue to  thwart charter schools from participating in the district’s bold  program of reform.

What’s surprising is the union couldn’t make a more artful argument.

This week, the UTLA sued the district to try to prevent charter operators from competing to run up to two dozen new schools that the school board voted 6-1 last August to put out to bid. Applications to operate the schools, which will open next fall, are due Jan. 11, and charter operators have indicated they’ll be bidding for all of them. The board will also consider applicants for an additional dozen persistently low-achieving schools, including Garfield High of “Stand and Deliver” fame.

The new schools – part of a massive $20 billion construction program in LA Unified – were built to relieve crowding. The school board will open up as many as 50 in the next four years.

Because some students will shift from old to new schools, the union is arguing that the new schools essentially are extensions of the old schools. And the only way under state law to convert an existing school to a charter school is if at least 50 percent of the tenured teachers vote to approve it. This ignores the fact that the state will consider the new schools as distinct, with their own school code, and the teachers for the new schools have yet to be hired.

The union also argues that in passing  construction bonds, voters didn’t earmark money for building new charters. They didn’t prohibit it either, and the board already has spent bond money on charter schools.

The union has indicated it will submit applications to create pilot schools, which have charter-like flexibility in some respects, but also maintain closer ties to the district and continue to adhere to union contracts. Banning charters from applying would all but eliminate competition.

Some 60,000 students in LA Unified already attend charter schools, many of them high-performing. Soon charters will be educating nearly 10 percent of district children. The new schools will have plenty of teachers – just not UTLA members.

The suit is, at its heart, an attempt to preserve dues-paying members.

By John Fensterwald on December 24th, 2009