Teachers Unions – Part 2

The nature and effects of “collective bargaining agreements.”

Continuing this series on teachers unions and their influence on American public education, this essay will focus on the nature and effects of “collective bargaining agreements” that contain the rules teachers unions impose on school systems.

As Terry Moe writes in his book Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools:

In a typical collective bargaining contract, in fact, there are so many rules about so many subjects, and the rules themselves can be so dense and complicated, that it often takes more than 100 pages to spell them all out. The contract for the Miami (Dade County) school system is 314 pages long. Cleveland's is 277 pages. It’s too bad all Americans can't just sit down and read the collective bargaining contracts their school districts have to live by. Many people, I hazard to guess, would be stunned. I know that, when my Stanford students—who are quite educated and mostly liberal—first take a look at some of these contracts, they can't believe what they are seeing. Here are some of the many rules that these documents tend to include: —Rules that allow teachers to make voluntary transfers to other schools, and to avoid being transferred away from their existing schools, based on seniority, —Rules that allow senior teachers to take the jobs of junior teachers, —Rules that require junior teachers to be laid off before senior teachers, —Rules that require principals to give advance notice to teachers before visiting their classrooms to evaluate their performance, —Rules that prohibit the use of standardized student tests for evaluating teacher performance, —Rules that specify all the procedures that must be followed—in setting up an “improvement program,” monitoring, reporting, mentoring, and so forth—if a teacher is evaluated as unsatisfactory, —Rules that specify all the procedures to be followed in any effort to dismiss a teacher, —Rules that give teachers guaranteed preparation times of a specified number of minutes a day, —Rules that limit the number of faculty meetings and their duration, —Rules that limit the number of parent conferences and other forums in which teachers meet with parents, —Rules that limit how many minutes teachers can be required to be on campus before and after school, —Rules that limit class size, —Rules that limit the number of courses, periods, or students a teacher must teach, —Rules that limit the nonteaching duties that teachers can be asked to perform, such as yard duty, hall duty, or lunch duty, —Rules that allow teachers to take paid sabbaticals, —Rules that give teachers liberal options for time off with pay (such as “personal” leave days), —Rules that put important decisions—about school policy, assignments, transfers, noninstructional duties—in the hands of committees on which teachers participate and may have a majority, —Rules that allow teachers to accumulate unused sick leave for years and eventually to convert it into cash windfalls, —Rules that provide for complicated, time-consuming grievance procedures that teachers can invoke if they feel their job rights have somehow been violated. —Rules that give teachers who are union officials time off to perform union duties (which means their classes must be taught by substitutes), —Rules that give the union access to school mailboxes, bulletin boards, classrooms, and other facilities to use for its own purposes.

As Moe points out, these sorts of concessions to teachers unions are easy for local governments to grant because “most rules don't cost the districts anything, and, in a world where money is often scarce and wages and benefits cannot be increased to the unions' satisfaction, districts can rather easily make concessions on rules—and win agreement and peace.”

Yet these “easy” giveaways by local governments have vast consequences:

However inexpensive these rules may be in purely financial terms, though, they are far-reaching in their importance for the schools. And for kids. The reason is simply this: the rules embedded in any collective bargaining contract are an integral part—usually a very big and consequential part—of how the schools in any school district are organized. They literally define, in large measure, the organization of schooling. They tell the district how it must operate, how it must spend its money, how it must allocate its resources—particularly its teachers, who are the most critical resource of all—and in general, what it can and cannot do in providing children with a quality education. So as collective bargaining has played out over several decades and over many thousands of school districts, it has heavily shaped the organization of the nation's entire public school system. The problem is obvious. If America's schools are to provide the best possible education for the nation's children, they need to be organized for that precise purpose. This can't happen, however, unless the formal rules that define and fill out each school's organization are specifically designed on the basis of what works best for children and student achievement—and that is clearly not how the organization of the public schools is determined. It is determined, in large measure, through the exercise of union power in collective bargaining. The rules that emerge from this exercise of power are designed to protect and promote the job-related interests of teachers, not to create the most effective organization for children and learning. There is a disconnect between what the public schools are supposed to do and how they are organized to do it.

As Moe writes:

When the unions deal with management negotiators or participate on school committees or collaborate on education reforms, they are not just providing objective information from teachers about how schooling can be made more effective for children. The unions are special interest advocates. They are advocates for the best interests of teachers, not for the best interests of children—and they use their power in all decision forums to see that outcomes reflect those special interests. Along the way, they use information strategically. They use it in the way defense lawyers use it: to make the best possible case for achieving their own objectives. This problem is built-in. It is rooted in the unions' organizational DNA, and it isn't going to change … The upshot is that the positives associated with teacher voice and input, while attractive in theory, are diluted and corrupted in practice. The usual references to voice and input have a nice sound to them, and so does all the related talk about collaboration, joint decisionmaking, and cooperation. But the reality is that, in all these processes, the unions are acting as special interest advocates …

Moe dispels some common misconceptions:

It would be nice to think that collective bargaining simply allows districts and teachers to arrive at better decisions about how to make schooling more effective for children. But nice is one thing, and real is another. Any realistic assessment of collective bargaining has to recognize that, at least for most districts most of the time, it is destined to produce many key decisions that depart from—and are systematically biased against—what is best for kids and effective organization. This does not happen because the people are bad or ill-intentioned. It happens because of the structure of the situation and the incentives that are built into it. For starters, the teachers unions are special interest advocates for their members. Their job in contract negotiations is to push hard for these special interests, and that is what they do. Well-informed participants and observers of collective bargaining recognize as much. Here, for example, is an account from a basic practitioner-oriented text on the subject: “The bargaining agent representing teachers exists solely to articulate and try to achieve the goals determined to be in the self-interest of its members … The bargaining agent represents teachers and their interests. The collective bargaining process is predicated upon the union or association being an advocate of a special interest group—the members of the bargaining unit.” Even if the districts were to push equally hard for outcomes that strictly reflect the best interests of children, the compromises of the negotiation process—which are required because the unions are genuinely powerful—would guarantee that final outcomes would be somewhere in-between what the districts demand and what the unions demand, and thus that they would depart from what is best for children. This departure, moreover, is the best-case scenario. For the fact is, the district side of the table cannot be counted upon to push for what is best for children … [S]chool board members—who have authority over the entire collective bargaining process—are elected, and the teachers unions are typically the most powerful force in local elections. As a result, many board members are union allies, others are reliably sympathetic to collective bargaining, and those who are unsympathetic have good reason to fear that, if they cross the unions, their jobs are at stake … [S]chool boards are likely to be weak representatives of children and overly inclined to give in (if budgets allow) to the special interest demands of the unions … School districts are essentially public monopolies, funded by taxes; and if the management caves in to union demands that increase costs and create inefficiencies, the districts don't lose students or money—for families have nowhere to go (unless they want to move or charter schools are available) … [T]he managers—elected school board members—retain their positions atop the hierarchy as long as they please the groups that hold political power. The system is geared to reward power, not performance, and this allows the unions to win concessions even if what they do is bad for schools. Over the last decade or so, several developments have worked to reduce the prounion bias somewhat, at least in some districts … [I]n some cities (but not most), charter schools have proliferated, and they offer a safety valve for families who want to escape from the local public schools, giving the districts greater reason to resist union demands … These are promising developments, but they don't come close to compensating for the serious problems just discussed. Collective bargaining is fundamentally biased. It is biased because the unions are special interest advocates, and their demands—which drive the process—are not aligned with what is best for kids and schools. It is biased because school boards are weak representatives of children, weak bargainers, and politically influenced by the unions. And it is biased because the public sector lacks the discipline of the private marketplace, allowing school boards and unions to impose costs and inefficiencies on the schools without having to worry much about the consequences for performance. All of these biases work together and in the same direction, creating a context in which collective bargaining can be expected to function quite nicely for most of the adults involved—but not for the kids who are supposed to be getting educated.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has compiled a national data set of the teachers union collective bargaining agreements of the largest scool districts in the country.  As Moe writes:

[I]t provides citizens and researchers alike with a handy, centralized source of information. We can use this NCTQ data set to shed light on three basic questions that bear on the bigger picture of collective bargaining nationwide. First, how common are particular types of rules in the collective bargaining contracts of the nation's largest districts? Second, how often do the states enact their own laws on these issues, and thus give unions an alternative—and much more efficient—way of putting their favored work rules on the books? And third, how restrictive are these labor contracts compared to the “contracts”—the meet-and-confer agreements, or simply the district policies (whichever prevail)—in school districts that don't have collective bargaining?

In the large districts especially, the unions are very active in school board elections and regularly bring their power to bear on board decisions. And the unions are active, and almost always major players, in the politics of education at the state level. So while the stereotype is that the teachers unions are “weak” in the states without collective bargaining, this is usually far from true. In any absolute sense, the unions tend to be quite powerful—just not as powerful as their counterparts in collective bargaining states.

Moe points to the obvious inefficiencies embedded in many collective bargaining agreements:

Why in the world should there be a formal limit on the number of times a school can have faculty meetings? Doesn't it make sense to have them when, in the judgment of principals, they are useful or necessary? Yet this is not the way unions view the situation. Faculty meetings are “extra work” that takes place after normal school hours, and all such work time is to be minimized—unless teachers are paid extra for it. In nonbargaining districts, the unions have made little headway on this issue: only 4 percent have rules putting caps on faculty meetings. But in the bargaining districts, 61 percent do (by, for example, limiting the number of meetings to once a month) … Finally, let's take a closer look at salary rules. The unions push hard for salary schedules that— via their formal “lanes”— require extra pay for master's degrees and other coursework and credentials that are unrelated to student achievement, but translate into enormous additional costs for districts. One measure of union success is the sheer number of lanes— for the greater their number, the more opportunities teachers have to increase their pay simply by accumulating new credentials (which anyone can do, good teacher or no). As table 6- 1 reveals, the differences in lane structure across districts are dramatic. In nonbargaining contexts, almost half the districts have just one to three lanes. In bargaining contexts, by contrast, almost half the districts have either four or five lanes, another 30 percent have six or seven lanes, and 16 percent have eight or more lanes. This would suggest, then, that where collective bargaining prevails unions are much better able to get districts to reward teachers based on credentials … Union leaders say that what is good for teachers is good for kids. Yet as we've seen in gory detail by looking at one contract provision after another, this claim simply isn't true. The unions regularly pressure for—and get—work rules that are not good for kids. Although there are surely some issues on which the interests of children and unions overlap, the ultimate outcome is that schools get organized in ways that undermine effective education … There is one more consideration to keep in mind. To the extent that the unions do anything that—through the pursuit of their own interests—happens to be good for kids and schools, we have to ask: why would the districts need to be forced into doing these things? In a hypothetical world without powerful unions, any modes of organization that promote effective schools—having to do with teacher pay, class size, work rules, overall spending levels, or anything else—could be adopted by school districts on their own. And indeed, in the modern era of accountability, they would have incentives to do just that. They would only have to be forced to do things that make the schools less effective—and much of collective bargaining involves exactly that … It's important not to make this more complicated than it needs to be. If bad teachers can't be removed from the classroom, that is definitely bad for children. If, due to seniority rules, teachers cannot be assigned to the schools and classes where they are needed most, or great young teachers are laid off while mediocre senior teachers are kept, these things are bad for kids too. This is not rocket science.

Studies confirm the negative effects collective bargaining agreement rules imposed by unions have on school performance.  As Moe writes:

[T]here are two studies that have been published in top-level academic journals. One is a detailed empirical analysis by Caroline Hoxby, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The other is a detailed empirical study of my own, published in the American Journal of Political Science. It is of some significance that these two studies are in agreement: both find that collective bargaining has a negative impact on performance. Hoxby explores the impact of collective bargaining by looking at changes in school districts over time. She includes all of the nation's districts in her analysis and employs a methodological design—entirely novel for this literature—that allows her to determine (while correcting for endogeneity problems) what difference it makes when districts become unionized and engage in collective bargaining. In the literature's most sophisticated statistical analysis, she shows that collective bargaining leads to increases in total spending, teacher salaries, and teacher-student ratios. That is to say, unions are able to use their power in collective bargaining to get more of the inputs they care about most, money and jobs. She also shows that, although collective bargaining increases school inputs, it also decreases their productivity, so that the unions' overall impact on school performance is actually negative, as measured by the student drop-out rate. My own study, carried out on a large sample of California school districts, approaches the subject from a different angle. I explore the actual contents of the labor contracts themselves, coding them according to how restrictive their rules are. Because all districts in the sample regularly engage in collective bargaining, I avoid the problem of comparing the “normal” districts that have it with the unusual districts that don't. My focus is on the “normal” districts themselves and on whether their contract rules have consequences for student learning. The baseline finding is that, controlling for a long list of variables that account for student backgrounds and the characteristics of schools and districts, the restrictiveness of the contract has a large negative impact: the more restrictive the contract, the lower the gains in student achievement. The size of the impact, moreover, is greater than that of any other organizational aspect of schools and districts. Collective bargaining matters for the effectiveness of schooling, and it matters a lot.

Michael Hartney, in his book How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education, provides a table in which:

items B–F highlight five different teacher policy issues where studies have shown that what students need -- to excel academically -- can conflict with what teachers understandably desire as employees. Collectively, these examples serve to illustrate how unions must sometimes pursue policies that benefit teachers professionally, but are, in some or all cases, suboptimal policies for students’ learning needs. Column 2 carefully explains how, for each policy issue at hand, the status quo policies benefit teachers’ interests as employees. Column 3 does the same thing for students, noting that when it comes to any teacher workforce policy, students’ sole interest is in having policies that increase their access to highly effective teachers. Consider item D in row 4, which provides a simple example to illustrate the logic of my argument. This item relates to the divergent interests that teachers and students have in the current practice of automatically paying teachers more for having earned an advanced degree (most typically a master’s degree).

In the next essay in this series, we’ll examine teacher tenure policies.