New York Unions New Assault on Charter Schools

The New York Post reports:

With a stroke of a pen, a single judge in Albany last month cost the state's public charter schools millions of dollars.

It's the latest special-interest assault on charter schools: force them to spend more money on services such as painting, cleaning and construction.

Justice Michael Lynch, a trial judge in Albany County, ruled against the Albany Preparatory and Icahn Charter Schools' suit against the state Labor Department - which last year ordered the school (and every other charter in the state) to start paying union-level wages to its janitorial and maintenance contractors.

The Labor Department order is especially rough on charters trying to rehab or build schools - because it also mandates union construction wages.

Yet the order is illegal on its face: The 1998 law that first permitted the formation of public charter schools in New York explicitly exempted them from any state mandates except those concerning health, safety and civil rights.

And, at the time the law was passed, everyone concerned understood that this meant that "prevailing wage" laws didn't apply to charters.

The state's Labor Law defines "prevailing wage" as the local union scale, which is anywhere from 38 percent more to double the cost, depending on the locality. It applies to most government entities, including school districts, and is one reason New York's taxes are so high.

But New York law also provides about 30 percent less funding for charters than for traditional public schools - including virtually no money for construction. Exempting charters from rules such as prevailing-wage was a universally understood trade-off to partly make up for the funding shortfall.

Indeed, that understanding has remained ever since. That's why union-friendly lawmakers have introduced bills that would apply such laws to charters virtually ever year for the last decade.

Of course, special interests are happy to get their way any way they can. They brought suit to force the mandate in 2000, with the support of then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer - but were shot down at trial in Onondaga County (Syracuse).

The next bid to end-run the law came last year - after Spitzer had become governor. His labor commissioner, Patricia Smith, ordered charters across the state to start paying "prevailing wages."

Several charters and charter-supporting groups (including the New York Charter Schools Association, where I work) sued - and lost last month in Albany County court.

Bizarrely, after pages of legal sophistry, Justice Lynch didn't even explain the key aspect of his ruling - he wrote simply that "the court declines to find" that charters' exemption from state mandates applies to labor law.

Out the window goes a decade of evenhanded, fair-market pay scales agreed to by charters and their contractors.

The appeal will take months, if not years.

In the meantime, money that schools would otherwise spend on children, teachers, classroom supplies or computers will instead go to contractors for services such as painting, cleaning or construction.

If the courts (or other public officials) don't end this distortion of justice, it will go on harming the education of thousands of New York's children.

As you can see,public schools exist for the benefit of public school teachers and workers.Education isn't the primary objective.