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This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

No sooner had Deborah Kolben’s Page 1 story about the tumult at the UFT’s charter school hit the newsstands than an aide to Randi Weingarten was on the phone. He said that the union’s president had asked him to call to say, in a friendly fashion, that we’d overplayed the story, which involves the disciplining of the principal of the union’s charter school because a group of first-grade pupils had been ordered to clean up a bathroom the students had allegedly soiled. Our reporter quoted Ms. Weingarten as saying the union “may never learn exactly what happened” but that the instructional leader made two errors in judgment by making the students clean up the mess and by failing to report the incident promptly to school trustees.
Our own instinct would have been to back up the principal. It doesn’t sound to us like the most onerous thing in the world for the principal, Rita Danis, who is said to be a wonderful educator, to suggest that some youngsters clean up a mess they made. We can imagine a situation where such a course might have seemed abusive – if, say, a lot of excrement were involved. But from what we’ve read, this was not even close to being a case of abuse. Rather it was largely a matter of paper towels being strewn about a boys’ bathroom. Ms. Danis no doubt was trying to teach the youngsters a sense of responsibility. The way it turned out the lesson they may receive is that if one complains about punishment one gets apologies and might not have to clean up the next mess one makes.
We support Ms. Weingarten’s decision to test the charter movement by opening a union school. We recognize that some mock the idea. But it strikes us as a chance for the union to have a learning experience of its own in the problems of management. One of the advantages of charter schools is that attendance is not mandatory, and if the UFT school turns out to be one in which children are instructed to clean up after a paper-towel fight, parents who don’t like it have the right to send their children to another school. So in the long run Ms. Danis and her colleagues in the UFT will have to answer to a market, albeit a constrained one, in education.