NYC's Unionized Charter School Experiment Fails

From The New York Times, "New York City Teachers’ Union Is Closing Portion of Its Brooklyn Charter School" by Kate Taylor:

The New York City teachers’ union announced on Friday that it was closing the kindergarten-to-eighth-grade portion of a charter school because of students’ low scores on state tests, ending an experiment intended to prove that such schools could thrive even with strict labor rules.

Charter schools are publicly financed but privately operated, and the vast majority of charter schools in the city are not unionized, giving them flexibility to have longer hours and the power to replace teachers easily.
***When the U.F.T. Charter School opened in 2005, Mr. Mulgrew’s predecessor, Randi Weingarten, who is now the president of the American Federation of Teachers, pledged that it would "show real, quantifiable student achievement and with those results, finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success."