As the black mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, has noted, we are presented with the perverse situation of organisations opposing schools because they have been successful in circumstances where others had failed. At the centre of this opposition are the immensely powerful teaching unions, who by negotiating teacher contracts running to hundreds of pages have successfully dominated school life. These contracts have made it nearly impossible to fire teachers. In an extreme example, a teacher who had been videoed putting a child's head down a toilet was reinstated. With back-pay. As the teacher union leader Albert Shanker is said to have remarked, "When children start paying union dues, I'll start representing the interests of children."

This union power has been integral to creating a system based on a belief in ever-greater centralisation and teachers' job security. Children are allocated places by the central school boards and the content of their education is dictated by negotiation between politicians and the unions, giving parents no choice and schools no incentive to innovate or improve. Teachers achieve tenure (permanent employment) after three years of service, and are then paid and promoted based on years of service. One state has actually made it illegal to use student performance as a factor in rewards. The abysmal results of this system are explained away by socioeconomic factors.

By challenging this ideology successful charter schools have run headlong into vituperative opposition from the education establishment, buttressed by the enormous power of the teaching unions. They are the largest political campaign contributors in the US and use their financial muscle to support sympathetic politicians or, more importantly, oppose candidates who challenge their ideology or threaten their domination. 

In May this year the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) joined with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) to file a lawsuit to stop the opening or expansion of 20 charter schools in New York. This lawsuit caused widespread confusion over what schools 7,000 children would attend after the summer break and provoked a march of 2,500 mostly black parents demanding people stop playing politics with the life chances of their children. Their response demonstrates the irrationality of the anti-reform position.