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The Union Contract: Bargaining Away Quality, Wrapping Schools in Red Tape

Modeled after labor arrangements in factories, the typical teachers union contract is loaded with provisions that do not promote education. These provisions drive away good teachers, protect bad teachers, raise costs, and tie principals’ hands.

The Dance of the Lemons

One highly destructive feature of the typical teachers union contract is a system that forces principals to hire teachers who transfer from other schools within the district. Since these teachers frequently are transferring because of poor performance in their original schools, the practice is called “the dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash.”

Unintended Consequences, a 2005 study by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), documented the damage done by this union-imposed staffing policy. In an extensive survey of five major metropolitan school districts, TNTP found that “40 percent of school-level vacancies, on average, were filled by voluntary transfers or excessed teachers over whom schools had either no choice at all or limited choice.” One principal decried the process as “not about the best-qualified [teacher] candidate but rather satisfying union rules.”

Thinning the Talent Pool

One problem related to the destructive transfer system is a hiring process that takes too long and/or starts too late, thanks in part to union contracts. Would-be teachers typically cannot be hired until senior teachers have had their pick of the vacancies, and the transfer process makes principals reluctant to post vacancies at all for fear of having a bad teacher fill it instead of a promising new hire. In its study Missed Opportunities, The New Teacher Project found that these staffing hurdles help push urban districts’ hiring timelines later to the point that “anywhere from 31 percent to almost 60 percent of applicants withdrew from the hiring process, often to accept jobs with districts that made offers earlier.”

“Of those who withdrew,” the TNTP report continues, “the majority (50 percent to 70 percent) cited the late hiring timeline as a major reason they took other jobs.”

The kicker is that it’s the better applicants who are driven away: “[A]pplicants who withdrew from the hiring process had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs, were 40 percent more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational coursework” than the teachers who ended up staying around to finally receive job offers.

Keeping Experienced Teachers from Poor Children

Another common problem with the union contract is a “bumping” policy that fills schools which are more needy (but less desirable to teach in) with greater numbers of inexperienced teachers. In its report Teaching Inequality, the Education Trust wrote:

“Children in the highest-poverty schools are assigned to novice teachers almost twice as often as children in low-poverty schools. Similarly, students in high-minority schools are assigned to novice teachers at twice the rate as students in schools without many minority students.”

Taking Money from Good Teachers to Give to Bad Teachers

During the expansion of teacher collective bargaining in the mid-twentieth century, economists from Harvard and the Australian National University found, the average, inflation-adjusted salary for U.S. teachers rose modestly -- while “the range of the [pay] scale narrowed sharply.” Measuring aptitude by the quality of the college a teacher attended, the researchers found that the advent of the collectively bargained union contract for teachers meant that more talented teachers were getting less, while less talented teachers were getting more:

The earnings of teachers in the lowest aptitude group (those from the bottom-tier colleges) rose dramatically relative to the average, so that teachers who in 1963 earned 73 percent of the average salary for teachers could expect to earn exactly the average by 2000. Meanwhile, the ratio of the earnings of teachers in the highest-aptitude group (from the highly selective colleges) to earnings of average teachers fell dramatically. In states where they began with an earnings ratio of 157 percent, they ended with a ratio of 98 percent.

Data from the National Center for Education Statistics, as reported by Education Week, add further evidence to the compressed-pay claim. NCES stats indicate that the average maximum teacher pay nationwide is only 1.85 times greater than the nationwide average salary for new teachers.

Watering Down Teacher Evaluations

Urban teachers union contracts commonly include evaluation systems that verge on meaninglessness. The New Teacher Project documented in its analysis of Chicago’s school district (sadly typical among urban districts when it comes to grading teachers) that 56 percent of principals admit to inflating teacher ratings. The reasons why are striking, and each can be traced back to the union contract:

• 30 percent of the principals said the teacher’s tenure would prevent dismissal regardless of the rating;
• 34 percent said it wasn’t worth enduring the lengthy union grievance proceedings;
• 51 percent said the union contract makes it difficult to lower the rating of a teacher that has previously received high ratings; and
• 73 percent said that the performance evaluation doesn’t actually evaluate performance.

Disturbingly, TNTP found that “between 2003 and 2006, only nine teachers [out of the district’s nearly 25,000] received two or more ‘unsatisfactory’ ratings and none was dismissed.”

Locking Up Education Dollars

Much of the money commanded by teachers union contracts is not being used well, at least from the perspective of parents or reformers. Several provisions commonly found in union contracts that cost serious money have been shown to do little to improve education quality. The nonprofit Education Sector found in a 2007 report that nearly 19 percent of all public education spending in America goes towards things like seniority-based pay increases and outsized benefits -- things that don’t go unappreciated, but don’t do much to improve teaching quality. If these provisions were done away with, the report found, $77 billion in education money would be freed up for initiatives that could actually improve learning, like paying high-performing teachers more money.

The Bottom Line

Too many schools are failing too many children. Americans should not remain complacent about how districts staff, assign, and compensate teachers. And too many teachers union contracts preserve archaic employment rules that have nothing to do with serving children.

© 2008 Center for Union Facts