One of my favorite working writers and all-around good natured human beings in my life right now is Roy Edroso. Roy the writer of the excellent alicublog, my one-time cubicle mate at the Voice, and the writer behind the great column “The Voice Explores-the Right Wing Blogosphere.” This week’s entry, “Rightbloggers Denounce the Wealthy, Treasonous Schoolteachers of Wisconsin” is, as usual, excellent and spot-on. If you want to get a sense of what goes on in the right wing blogs without having to wade through them yourself, check out Roy’s weekly round-up.

I’ll be curious to see how the Wisconsin teacher-union story plays in the NYC education wars over the coming weeks. As I’ve written recently,there are certainly ways in which non-union charter schools can work, sometimes with excellent results. What I find most interesting about communities created around charter schools, though, is the overall community – students, teachers, and parents. There is an anti-union screed that runs deep in the charter versus traditional public school battle. As Roy shows in his column, a lot of this is rooted in a union bust. To weaken the union, you must make its member workers the enemy…and in Wisconsin (and I predict, as NYC argues over laying off 6,000 teachers using “last in, first out” or utilizing seniority, in NYC as well), “evil” unionized teachers will again be blamed.

But it isn’t the teachers, overall, that I think are the problem when you look at schools. Yes, in some charters, the teaching team is very well coordinated. But I’ve rarely met a teacher in any school who isn’t well meaning and dedicated. Teachers in new charters benefit from a coordinated team, but from ridiculously involved parents. That level of parent involvement, I suspect, plays a far larger role in student performance school wide than whether or not teachers have collective bargaining rights.