[EPI welcomes
reader
feedback.]
Teacher Unions and Education Reform
Remarks by Dr. Myron Lieberman at the
Wingspread Conference, "Everything You Wanted to Know About
Teachers and Teaching," September 15-17, 2000, Racine,
Wisconsin, sponsored by the Hechinger Institute on Education
and the Media and the Johnson Foundation
Although I was pleasantly surprised to be invited to this
seminar, I was very unhappy with its title: Everything You
Wanted to Know About Teachers and Teaching. These are huge
subject matters that fill libraries, and the idea of
covering everything about them in a day and a half seminar
seemed unrealistic. To make matters worse, the subject of
teacher unions, which is related but different from teachers
and teaching, was accorded an hour and 45 minutes total.
This subject matter includes:
- the legal framework of teacher unions and collective
bargaining;
- the scope of teacher bargaining;
- the dynamics of bargaining;
- impasse procedures;
- teacher union political operations at the local,
state, and national levels;
- the governance of teacher unions;
- union dynamics and caucuses;
- the teacher union impact on education;
- the costs of teacher unionization to teachers and to
school districts;
- teacher union control of the PTA; and
- many other topics that I regard as important, but
individually require more than a cursory discussion if
you are to report on education realistically.
Consider just two facts about the teacher unions. With
the possible exception of California, more delegates to the
Democratic National Convention were members of the NEA/AFT
than from any state in the union; around one ninth of all
the delegates.
Second, NEA/AFT revenues at all levels probably exceed
$1.3 billion a year, not including their PAC funds,
foundations, and a host of special funds under their
control. I cannot think of any other organization that plays
such an important role in American politics that receives so
little critical scrutiny from media.
What has been the impact of the NEA/AFT on educational
reform? It is practically impossible to answer this question
satisfactorily in a brief presentation because there is so
little agreement on what are reforms and the extent to which
they are being implemented. Meaningful discussions of the
union impact on educational reform would have to be preceded
by hours of definitional discussions with little or no
likelihood of agreement among interested parties. For this
reason, I shall use reform to mean increasing student
achievement with the same level of resources or maintaining
the levels of achievement with less resources, or some
combination of these outcomes.
The typical treatment of reform is actually misleading.
Almost invariably, it focuses on achievement without any
reference to costs. For example, the teacher unions assert
that reducing class size is a real reform, not an expensive,
untested, divisive fad like vouchers. Next to teacher
compensation, class size is the most significant factor
affecting school budgets. Therefore, the question should be,
how much improvement can we get for how much reduction in
class size, and what will be the costs? This question is
never answered because it is never raised -- a tremendous
strategic advantage for the teacher unions.
The reason is simple enough. "Equalization" in education
always means spending more on students or school districts
receiving less than some predetermined average.
Theoretically, we could achieve equalization by reducing the
amounts spent at the top, but this is never what happens.
If you consider "reforms" solely in terms of achievement,
it is always possible to argue honestly that more spending
will bring about higher levels of achievement. The situation
is very much like the decision on whether or not to spend
more on advertising. Very few companies could not sell more
of what they produce by increasing their advertising budget,
but the practical question is how many more sales will
result from a stipulated increase in the advertising budget.
Similarly, the meaningful question on alleged reforms is not
whether they result in higher levels of achievement, but
what is the cost of the improvement, if any. Failure to
raise this question is one of the reasons why discussions of
educational reform are so misleading.
The union position is that the unions are a potent force
for educational reform, but position assumes that school
management, which has the responsibility for reform, must be
forced to accept reforms by the union, which does not have
this responsibility. Note the contrast with our experience
in other industries; when foreign carmakers decided to make
cars in the United States, they typically located in states
where unions were weak; can anyone identify a carmaker who
said, "I'm trying to find a location where the union is
strong because it will force my company to be more
productive?"
In asking about the union impact on reform, we are asking
a question about organizations, not individuals or
particular circumstances. In short, the question is really
about the central tendencies of unions, and these tendencies
are not invalidated by the outcome of negotiations in
particular situations.
Basically, teacher unions, like unions generally, are
political organizations. That is, formally or theoretically,
union governance is based upon the votes of union members,
not upon shares of stock or economic criteria. To understand
the significance of this fact, consider union opposition to
merit pay. According to the folklore of education, union
opposition is due to the subjectivity of merit pay, and the
likelihood that it will be used to reward bootlickers and
discriminate against union activists. The real reasons for
union opposition are quite different. In order for merit pay
to be an effective incentive, the amounts have to be
substantial. Teachers are not going to seek merit pay in the
face of opposition from their fellow teachers if merit pay
is only a few hundred dollars; however, as the amounts go
up, the number of teachers who can receive merit pay will
decline.
In contrast, the unions are in business to achieve
benefits for everyone, not large benefits that can be
awarded to only a few. Second, the union's interest is to
have members believe that everything they get is due to the
union's efforts; large rewards to a few teachers on the
basis of their own efforts would weaken this union
objective. Third, and most important, consider the
inevitable outcome under merit pay. For every teacher who
receives merit pay, nine others will request the union to
file a grievance on their behalf, alleging that the grievant
deserved merit pay more than the teachers who received it.
What does the union do now? Whatever it does, it will
antagonize some members -- a no win situation for the union.
To avoid this situation, the unions oppose merit pay.
I am not one who regards merit pay as a major issue, even
though I am responsible to a significant extent for the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS),
a disaster that deserves scrutiny instead of gullible
acceptance by media. In any event, there is a major reform
issue here that flies beneath the media radar screen. My
reference is to the single salary schedule, especially to
union opposition to salary differentials for teachers of
difficult to staff positions, such as mathematics and
science.
What the unions do is to cite the shortages of
mathematics and science teachers as a reason to raise all
teacher salaries. The problem is that with single salary
schedules, school districts must pay more to all teachers in
order to pay more to a few teachers for difficult to fill
positions. This results in overpayments to most teachers and
underpayments to the teachers in difficult to staff
positions. To understand the damage this does, consider what
would happen if a university sought to pay medical
professors the same salary and benefits as journalism
professors. In a very short time, the university would not
have a medical school even if the university paid journalism
professors much more than they could get on their own.
It is difficult to see how anyone can fail to recognize
the negative effects of single salary schedules; they are
the single greatest obstacle to recruitment of competent
teachers in critically important subject areas, yet media
have focused almost entirely on merit pay. Note again how
political character of unions renders their anti-reform
position inevitable. Mathematics and science teachers are a
small minority among school district staff. Consequently, it
would be virtually impossible to advocate a differential for
mathematics and science teachers and maintain a leadership
position in the teacher unions. Down the road, some unions
may agree to such differentials as something that the school
board was able to impose upon the union, but the possibility
that a few school boards may be able to break away from a
single salary schedule should not be allowed to obscure the
impact of union determination to maintain such schedules.
Let me add one additional observation. The teacher unions
constantly emphasize the importance of paying all teachers
more. Many economists will agree, however, that the absence
of high salaries -- very high salaries -- for a small number
of teachers is a more important issue. Education does not
attract the kind of individuals, such as Harvard dropout
Bill Gates, who can raise the level of the entire industry.
Why would any Bill Gates type enter the teaching profession,
if we can call it that? The answer is that they would not,
and do not, one of the reasons why most sectors of our
economy far outstrip education in productivity growth.
|
Building a Competitive Education Industry
