The role of teacher unions in education politics and policy is deeply polarizing. Critics (often including ourselves) typically assert that these organizations are the prime obstacles to needed reforms in K–12 schooling, while defenders (typically, also, supporters of the education status quo) insist that they are bulwarks of professionalism and safeguards against caprice and risky innovation.

Yet these arguments have rested on little but anecdote, opinion, and personal observation. There’s been scant real information on how much teacher unions matter, how exactly they seek to wield influence, and whether they wield more of it in some places than others.

There’s plenty of conventional wisdom, to be sure, mostly along the lines of, “unions are most powerful where every teacher must belong to them and every district must bargain with them and least consequential in ‘right-to-work’ states.”

But is that really true? Even if it is, does it oversimplify a more complex and nuanced situation?

In a major study we released this week together with Education Reform Now, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions: A State-By-State Comparison, we dug deep, churning vast amounts of data to parse the differences in political strength across state-level unions in the fifty states plus the District of Columbia.

Let us acknowledge that it’s not a perfect analysis. Let us admit that its conclusions are more nuanced, even equivocal, than we at Fordham are accustomed to. And let us also recognize that, even as we were gathering and analyzing all that data, multiple factors—economic woes, party shifts, court decisions, changing policy agendas, the arrival of many new players—conspired to produce enormous flux in precisely the realms that we were examining.

Some union leaders are thrilled to wield that cudgel against our report, even terming it “laughable” and “silly.” AFT President Randi Weingarten said it appeared to be “deeply flawed and misleading” and faulted it for omitting poverty in the analysis. (She didn’t say whose poverty. The states’? The kids’? The teachers’? We did, in fact, examine the resource levels of state unions themselves.)

But of course they wouldn’t like it. They don’t want to be studied or compared. They go to great lengths to conceal information about the means by which they wield power. If they lauded our analysis, you would and should be suspicious of it.

In the end, we learned a ton from it—about individual states, about national patterns, about unexpected relationships, and about surprising exceptions. The report itself provides vast detail and is worth examining, but here are a few highlights:

Click to enlarge

• As the map shows, and as you likely expected, the strongest unions are generally found on the West Coast, in the Northeast, and in the industrial Midwest; the South is mostly the province of relatively weak unions. But there are surprises. Hawaii, currently perched on the edge of a teacher strike, might be unknown to many as union-central. Likewise, Montana and Alabama punch well above their reputational weights.

• Thirty-two states require local school boards to bargain collectively with their teachers, fourteen states permit local boards to do this, and five states prohibit collective bargaining altogether (Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia).• Teacher strikes, like the one recently concluded in Chicago, are legal in fourteen states and illegal in thirty-seven.

• Twenty-three states are “right-to-work” states, meaning that they prohibit unions from collecting “agency fees” from non-members. Twenty-eight jurisdictions allow such fees.

• In the 2010 election cycle, teacher unions in twenty-two states were among the top ten overall donors (excluding individual donations) to candidates for governor, legislature, high court, and elected education positions. In twenty-one states, they were among the top five highest-giving interest groups. In Colorado and Indiana, they ranked first.

• In just two states (Pennsylvania and New Jersey) did our survey of insiders unanimously deem teacher unions the most influential entities in shaping education policy over a recent three-year period. But survey respondents in twenty states found them to be generally more influential than other entities (including the state school board, state superintendent, governor, legislators, business interests, and advocacy groups).

• Despite all of that, the unions’ influence may be waning. For the three years prior to 2011, education policies in most states reflected union priorities. But in 2011’s legislative sessions (after 2010’s historic Republican surge), a growing number of lawmakers enacted policies that were less in line with union priorities.

We could not systematically link our rankings of union strength to state-level student achievement. Only a few of our data points (like teacher-employment policies) are apt to affect achievement directly. Others, like spending on education, could “touch” students indirectly, but there’s no strong evidence to support their link to achievement. We also have a timing problem since many state policies are in flux and don’t align with point-in-time snapshots of achievement. More important, we know that many other factors at both the state and local levels—poverty included, Randi!—affect how much and how well students learn, so postulating a relationship between state-level union activity and student achievement would be an oversimplification.

Having said that, we can’t resist eyeballing whether policies in a few high-performing states are more in line with the positions of reformers or of teacher unions. Take, for example, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Maryland. These three states, which, along with Florida, have significantly outpaced the rest of the country in student-achievement gains since the early 1990s, are often viewed as bastions of union influence. To be sure, they all have lots of unionized teachers. But when union strength is considered more holistically, these states show up toward the middle of the pack (nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third, respectively).

No, we can’t claim that weakened unions alone will result in student-achievement gains. Still, suffice it to say that no one can claim with a straight face: “Want to boost student outcomes? Empower the teachers unions!” Which means, to our eyes at least, that what groups like Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, and StudentsFirst are doing to challenge the hegemony of the unions is appropriate, important, and good for the country.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Mike Petrilli

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

The wage piece of the deal is likely to add about $74 million per year over the next four years to a municipal budget that is already deeply in the red. The extra dollars that go into wages will be taken out of other budgets, rendering classrooms and other facilities less suitable than before. The moderately stiffer standards for teacher evaluation, both before and after tenure, may make marginal improvements in teaching performance, but none that will be significant in the short term. The overall dismal performance of the Chicago public school system, with its 60 percent graduation rate, will remain more or less what it has been.

The recent news affirms that public education in Chicago and other major cities needs to be fundamentally overhauled. The first item on the reform list should be the collective bargaining system, which has taken over public education for the last fifty or so years. Collective bargaining has its roots in the private sector, where it received a huge boost from the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The act allowed workers to band together to select, by secret ballot, a union of their choice to represent them in direct negotiations with the employer, who was bound to negotiate with them in good faith over all relevant terms and conditions of employment. Even in the private sphere, the decision to legitimate collective bargaining was a major policy mistake whose negative influences remain manifest to this present day.

Competitive Markets, Thwarted

Left to their own devices, labor markets are highly competitive. The protection that any worker has against his employer does not rest on endless rounds of bargaining backed by the threat of strike, but in his ability to leave his job to work for another employer who offers higher wages and better terms. No firm, therefore, can keep workers at artificially low wages so long as free entry is allowed by new firms. The competitive labor market allows many small adjustments, which on average tie wage levels to overall productivity, not to the artificial scarcity created under the NLRA.

The presence of a union changes all of that. With unions, the market is no longer as competitive because the union holds a monopoly enforced by law when it becomes the exclusive bargaining agent for its members. Under competition, wages tend to converge to a single point, so that the bargaining range—the gap between the most that the employer is willing to pay and the least that the worker will accept—shrinks.

In perfect competition, which we never see, all wages are uniquely determined, so that all transactions take place virtually costlessly on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The rate of job formation is high, and the costs per transaction are low, so few scarce resources are squandered in setting the wages and conditions of employment.

Union monopoly power expands that bargaining range. To keep it simple, assume that the employer can remain in business if it pays a wage of $25 per hour, and the workers are willing to stay employed at $15 per hour. Each side has a strong incentive to hold out for its preferred outcome, even at the cost of protracted and heated negotiations where both sides are posturing. Their bargaining threats become credible so long as workers are prepared to strike and employers are prepared to lockout workers if a deal is not reached. In most cases, these negotiations do produce a deal after both sides suffer high transaction costs, but in some fraction of cases they do not.

Advocates of the NLRA in 1935 hailed the law as a way to bring “industrial peace” to the troubled world of management-labor relations. But once the enforced labor truce of World War II came to an end, the “strike wave” of 1946 led to some important revisions of the NLRA that cut back on union power. But those changes did nothing to reintroduce competitive employment markets.

Over time, union power dwindled, not because the bargaining structure was reformed, but because deregulation and greater foreign competition left labor fewer monopoly profits to extract in key industries such as automobile and steel. With less to offer, union ranks have shrunk to, today, about seven percent of the market from a high of about 35 percent in the mid-1950s.

The Tyranny of Public Unions

Public unions have been exempt in large measure from these global changes, given that public education is run by a dominant firm—one with the lion’s share of the market that its small fringe competitors cannot displace. Today, the monopoly position of the teachers remains strong enough that they can muscle their way to a new contract.

But it is important to note the collateral damage that this bargaining process causes. There are about 350,000 students in the Chicago public schools, and each of their families had to scramble for seven days to adapt to the strike dislocations. Estimate the cost of these frantic last-minute arrangements at $20 per day per family, and the daily losses from the strike equal about $7 million per day or about $50 million for the strike period, which comes to about one-sixth of the salary gains that the teachers received.

Yet note this critical difference between the parents’ losses and the teachers’ gains. The wage increases were, at best, transfer payments from the public treasury to the teachers—a maneuvering of funds that will neither increase nor decrease the overall social welfare, given that typically a dollar in the hands of one party is worth as much as it is in the hands of another.

Progressives often challenge this assumption, but are hard-pressed to show that dollars are worth more in the hands of teachers than they are in the hands of parents. The key point is that these high wage settlements are likely to decrease social welfare if they contribute to the deterioration of the public finances of the city, making it all the more likely that it will default on its future obligations, especially its sorely underfunded pension plans. The short-term losses of the parents, by contrast, were not simple transfer payments. They were dead-weight social losses needed to repair the damage caused by the strike.

The overall social losses run even higher, given the ripple effects of the strike on third parties. These include private employers, whose routines were disrupted, and businesses and shops, which lost business.

In addition, the resolution of this episode before disaster struck is likely to further entrench the current system of gladiatorial combat between management and labor, which, in turn, increases long-term instability in the education sector in at least two ways. First, at the conclusion of this contract, the same cycle of negotiations will occur yet one more time. Second, the continued operation of the system is likely to expose the soft-underbelly of modern public finance—the underfunded pension plans crying out for reforms that union leaders, along with other public employees, resist.

The Pension Quagmire

The root of this difficulty is that both sides in public-employee negotiations find it in their interest to reduce the wage portion of the overall collective bargaining agreement—which, in the case of the Chicago public school teachers, is quite high at over $75,000 per year—in favor of larger pension benefits under a “defined benefits” plan. Such a plan places the risk of financial shortfall squarely on the public treasury.

The original motivation for defined-benefit plans is that a large financial system is better able to cushion the blow of market fluctuations than individual employees. But, in practice, the great risk to this approach is that it leads both sides to understate the cost of these liabilities by overstating the anticipated rate of return on the assets—often at a ludicrous eight percent—which are set aside to fund the program.

The alternative “defined contribution” system caps the liability of the public employer at the amount of the contribution, and then requires the individual employee to manage that fund, usually by diversifying assets, in ways that minimize the economic risks. Unfortunately, half-hearted efforts to switch future employees, and only future employees, to this plan will do nothing to avert the financial melt-down that is likely to come when these plans fail in the coming decades.

The Charter School Alternative

Fiddling with the collective bargaining system will do nothing to counter the system’s short-term political instability (from strikes) and its long-term insolvency (from excessive pension obligations). The political opposition to dismantling the public bargaining system is too ferocious to overcome. The best tactic, therefore, is to sap teachers unions of their power by supporting a competitive charter school system.

Under the charter school system, the city government continues to fund the schools but leaves separate and competing systems to run the schools and hire the teachers. This competitive environment reduces the gains that teachers get from unionization, and forces them to face savvy school administrators who know full well that unionization of their schools can easily be their death warrant. It has not gone unnoticed that during the Chicago strike, about 50,000 students continued their education uninterrupted in charter schools.

Defenders of public school teachers make the “bold progressive” case that charter school teachers earn, on average, eight-percent less than their unionized rivals. But they are wrong to think that this wage differential points to the weakness of the charter school system. The lower wages cannot count as an overall disadvantage of the system because of the tax relief that they confer on the system as a whole. In addition, it is risky to claim that lower wages impose a hardship on teachers, who often desire these coveted positions.

Further, the absence of unions means the absence of union dues and union work obligations, which together could easily account for a quarter to a half of the total wage differential. Additionally, charter school teachers do not face the risks of work disruptions through strike, with the attendant financial and emotional risks. And working in these environments has the advantage of forging more productive relations with school administrators because of the absence of restrictive union work rules that contribute to daily standoffs between management and labor.

There are today endless studies that compare the relative efficiency of charter schools to regular public schools. These reports have been used to critique and laud charter schools in equal measures. But the bottom line seems to be that for inner city students, charter schools offer some systematic long-term improvement, which accounts for the long-waiting lists of students desperate to escape the public school monopoly.

The preferred public policy should therefore allow more charters to be issued and fewer government restrictions to be placed on the formation and  operation of such schools. That will in turn put greater pressure on public school systems to clean up their own acts, if only to retain students.

Such competition will also give added impetus to the generally salutary, but not transformative, Race to the Top initiative of the Obama administration, championed by Arne Duncan, himself the former head (2001-2008) of the Chicago Public Schools.

In the end, the real driver of educational reform must be competition from new entrants, blessed, not regulated, by local governments.

Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

This article appeared first on Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution’s online journal.

Behind the Headline
The Long Reach of Teachers’ Unions
Education Next| Fall 2010

In this morning’s New York Times, Motoko Rich writes about the growth in donations made by teachers unions to support Republican candidates. Mike Antonucci had an article about the wide range of candidates and groups that teachers unions were supporting in the Fall 2010 issue of Ed Next. He wrote

If you think it’s far-fetched to suggest that a teachers union could play the role of political kingmaker, think again. The largest political campaign spender in America is not a megacorporation, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or ExxonMobil. It isn’t an industry association, like the American Bankers Association or the National Association of Realtors. It’s not even a labor federation, like the AFL-CIO. If you combine the campaign spending of all those entities it does not match the amount spent by the National Education Association, the public-sector labor union that represents some 2.3 million K–12 public school teachers and nearly a million education support workers (bus drivers, custodians, food service employees), retirees, and college student members.

-Education Next

Thanks a bunch, CTU.

This strike—the first big one by teachers in ages—will be examined every which way for months to come, and the contract that was finally agreed upon will be carefully autopsied. (If you’d like to see a careful analysis of a previous Chicago teacher contract, download Fordham’s Leadership Limbo report and flip to page fifty. If you’d like to inspect the contract that was in force until a couple of months ago—be warned that it’s 176 pages long!—you can access it from the National Council on Teacher Quality’s website.)

As for the new contract, my friends at NCTQ are more bullish than I am. Rick Hess’s take seems closer to the mark. Yes, it contains a handful of features from Rahm’s reform shopping list. But every one of them was weakened, diluted, deferred, or made very expensive for a city that can ill afford the added cost.

Here is what the CTU said to its own members in advance of Tuesday’s ratification vote:

Cities everywhere have been forced to adopt performance pay. Not here in Chicago! Months ago, CTU members won a strike authorization vote that our enemies thought would be impossible- now we have stopped the Board from imposing merit pay! We preserved our lanes and steps when the politicians and press predicted they were history. We held the line on healthcare costs….

And here’s what AFT president Randi Weingarten said in hailing the ratification:

CTU President Karen Lewis and her leadership team, with whom the AFT worked closely throughout this process, have represented their members well and made clear that their concerns go beyond wages and benefits to include all the issues affecting their students’ education. They demonstrated that collective bargaining is an essential tool to strengthen public schools.

But of course that’s precisely what this episode did not demonstrate. What it demonstrated was that what teacher unions care about has practically nothing to do with what’s good for the kids and everything to do with what teachers want for themselves. They are fundamentally selfish.

You can say that’s what unions exist to do. I don’t know for sure if the late Albert Shanker actually did declare that “when kids vote in union elections, that’s when I’ll worry about them” or words to that effect. But yes, it’s a fact that unions look after their members.

Let them then not pretend otherwise, despite all this talk by Randi Weingarten and Karen Lewis about the new CTU contract being in the best interest of Chicago’s schoolchildren. It’s not. Rahm’s original proposals were—and were more affordable, to boot.

We’ve seen a few instances in recent years of labor unions eventually realizing that the health of their industry and the quality of its products actually bear, in the long run, on their own jobs and well-being. The United Auto Workers eventually figured that out with regard to the U.S. auto industry. But not until Detroit’s “Big Three” were collapsing. And other major industries actually did collapse—“Big Steel,” for instance—in large part because their unions never got the message that it was bad for them to have those jobs move to Korea or Brazil.

Other industries—look at the airlines—have to declare bankruptcy in order to get out from under labor contracts that are, in fact, helping to bankrupt them. That’s because their unions were (and are), like the CTU, attending only to the interests, priorities, and preferences of the employees who belong to them.

By week two of the Chicago strike, I suspect, residents of the Windy City were figuring this out. At the outset, they tended to blame Rahm, not the CTU, for the walkout. But when a compromise was struck by district and union representatives—a compromise, I repeat, that is about the employees’ interests, not the kids’ or the taxpayers’—and the union still continued to strike for two utterly unnecessary days, Chicago’s parents and voters must have realized that this was indeed about selfish employees, not provocative mayors.

And that, I believe, is the principal long-term good that may come out of this for the country as a whole. Whitney Tilson got it right when he commented the other day that

the outrageous, selfish, greedy behavior by the union is an absolute godsend to we [sic] reformers. Parents in Chicago – and everyone else who’s paying attention across the country – are so mad that they can’t see straight – and it’s now 100% directed at the union. This will benefit us in Chicago and nationally for years to come. This type of behavior isn’t an outlier of course: so many teachers unions in cities and states all over the country are so disconnected from reality, so arrogant, and so used to bullying everyone that they do self-destructive things like this regularly, greatly diminishing whatever public support they might have. It may well be the greatest asset we reformers have.

Let’s hope he’s right. Then let’s make the most of it.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Jay Greene takes on the issue in a wonderfully sassy post  headlined “In Chicago—Phony Merit Pay is Dead, Long Live True Merit Pay.” He recognizes that the ink isn’t dry on the deal hammered out between the Chicago Public Schools and the striking Chicago Teachers Union, but he suggests that it was a blessing (in disguise?) that CPS gave up on its attempt at “differentiated compensation” but retained the right to open new charter schools. As Greene argues, the former is “phony” merit pay and the latter is “true” merit pay:

In phony merit pay—the kind that hardly exists in any industry—there is a mechanistic calculation of performance that determines the size of a small bonus that is provided in addition to a base salary that is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance. You can stink and still keep your job and pay. The worst that can happen is you miss out on some or all of a modest bonus. To make it even more phony, in the few cases where this kind of phony merit pay has been tried, the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus.

Greene says that the most effective merit pay system is the one that gets you the best teachers.  As he writes,

The net effect of growing charter schools, closing under-enrolled traditional public schools, and only hiring back the best and most desired teachers from those schools is a true merit pay system. Bad teachers are let go. Good teachers not only get their job back, but they also get an extremely generous pay raise over the next four years for staying and being good. That’s real merit pay.

At a more micro level, recent research by Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt, Harvard professor and MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner Roland Fryer, Chicago’s John List, and University of California San Diego’s Sally Sadoff, supports this seemingly harsh view of performance-boosting incentives (for a quick introduction, read Amber Winker’s analysis). National Public Radio’s Shankar Vedantam took up the question this morning, interviewing John List about the group’s “loss aversion” study of 150 K-8 teachers in the Chicago Heights school district, a hard-scrabble community twenty miles south of Chicago proper where almost all the students are poor and only 64 percent meet minimum proficiency standards. The researchers divided the teachers into three groups, as Vedantam says,

One group got no incentive; they just went about their school year as usual. A second group was promised a bonus if their students did well at math.
The third group is where the psychology came in: The teachers were given a bonus of $4,000 upfront — but it had a catch. If student math performance didn’t improve, teachers had to sign a contract promising to return some or all of the money.

The third group burned up the competition. “Teachers who were paid in advance and [were] asked to give the money back if their students did not perform,” List tells NPR, “—their [students'] test scores were actually out of the roof: two to three times higher than the gains of the teachers in the traditional bonus group.” List said he believed that the loss aversion incentive was so successful because it made teachers focus on the kids who were not mastering the material and stick with them until they got it.

Writing about the study last July, The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann called it a “major breakthrough.”

There are, of course, the caveats; the data on reading scores, for instance, said Weissmann, were “shakier, since most students ultimately had more than one instructor working with them on language skills.”

And then there’s the politics of the thing. As Vedantam notes, “List warned that the bonus system needed buy-in from teachers. Teaching isn’t like making widgets; it requires motivation and passion. If teachers feel they are being manipulated rather than encouraged to improve their performance, they could end up looking for other lines of work.” Or they might just choke under the pressure. “From the perspective of a teacher’s union,” says Weissmann, “it’s easy to see how this would make the [merit pay] concept even more unpalatable—who wants to subject themselves to the stress of seeing their bonus stripped away?”

This is where we come back to Jay Greene. A brand-new system (“non-unionized,” in Greene’s view) offers the advantage of starting fresh. Knowing the rules going in—e.g., that you will be judged on performance (yours and your students) and that you could lose your job—makes it much easier to establish a collaborative and school-based incentive system.  As Kathleen Porter-Magee suggests, “Top-down systems that bypass or undermine school leaders rarely produce excellence in the classroom.”  In this case, the “top-down” applies just as well to federal and state bureaucrats as it does to organized labor.

So, though the ink isn’t dry yet, Chicagoans may have dodged a bullet without knowing it. The new CTU contract will not have the “phony” merit pay (differentiated pay) but will have the “real” thing (school autonomy). Whether it becomes an Edvard Munch moment is anyone’s guess. But it should be better for students.

-Peter Meyer

This post first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

That’s not an accident. The local and national unions surely realized, after an onslaught of negative coverage, that complaining about 16 percent raises on top of $75,000 average salaries was not a winning argument during a period of 8 percent unemployment. So they changed their talking points: Now the teachers were upset about evaluations that would link their performance reviews with students’ test scores. But that position is unpopular, too—and puts the union at odds with President Obama—so now they are striking over…class sizes and air conditioning?

Right.

This is akin to the Republican defense of the dubious “Voter ID” laws: That they are necessary to protect against voter fraud. Everyone knows they are a cynical ploy to suppress the participation of poor and minority citizens—likely Democratic voters. But GOP officials can’t admit that. So they obfuscate.

So it is with the Chicago Teachers Union. It’s the meat-and-potatoes issue of pay and benefits that has been front and center during the months-long negotiations; to argue otherwise is simply dishonest.

And what about the issue of “respect”? The idea that Rahmbo is trying to steamroll the unions on his way to becoming an “imperial” mayor?

This is getting closer to the truth. The unions—in Chicago and other big cities—grew accustomed over the past four decades to holding veto power over all key education decisions. When leaders wanted reform, they needed to accept union-approved, watered-down versions—or pay up. As Rick Hess has argued, the more-money-for-more-reform bargain greased the wheels of compromise during flush times—but is unsustainable during today’s New Normal of flat-lined revenues and gaping deficits.

To be sure, many teachers (in Chicago and nationwide) feel blamed, discouraged, demoralized, and afraid; those sentiments were on display in the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. The brash rhetoric and take-no-prisoners tactics of reformers—elected and otherwise—surely contribute to this dynamic (along with watching many colleagues get pink slips as districts try to close budget holes).

But such frustrations aren’t why the teachers of the Windy City took to the streets and sent the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans into disarray. Workers in all sectors of the economy experience stress and slights; it’s part of life. But most don’t walk off the job.

No, this is ultimately about power. The unions are feeling whipsawed by tectonic shifts that have occurred within the Democratic Party in recent years, with Democrats for Education Reform creating space for political leaders—from the mayor’s office to the Oval Office—to challenge them on fundamental issues. (And of course there are the charter schools, still open for business, which challenge the union’s monopoly to boot.) As a Chicago teacher told the local news before the strike, “We didn’t start this fight. We’re only defending ourselves.”

She’s right, in a way: For decades there was no fighting, just abdicating, as Democratic city officials gave the unions pretty much everything they wanted. (That’s why there have been so few teacher strikes in the past couple of decades.) Those days are over; the unions aren’t happy about it. Yet even as this week’s organized-labor tantrum winds down, it already feels more like a reminder of a past era or a last gasp than a sign of things to come.

-Mike Petrilli

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

It’s rarely wise for administrators (or school boards, or mayors) to pick unnecessary fights, but it’s also unwise to shy away from those that need to be fought through on behalf of the public interest.

School systems like Chicago’s face many opportunities for collaboration with teachers unions. For example, preparing to teach to the new, higher “Common Core” standards is an effort best done together, with the expertise of front-line teachers playing a key role.

But there are other times when the interests of the teachers and those of the broader public are not the same. Especially when money is tight, administrators (and elected officials like Rahm Emmanuel) have a duty to look out for the public fisc. More cash for teacher salaries, as the Chicago Teachers Union is demanding, means less for everything else—after-school programs, early childhood initiatives, police, public health, everything. Leaders need to hold the line.

Likewise with the issue of job security. Unions are built to protect their members’ jobs and pensions, regardless of performance. The public, on the other hand, is best served when administrators put the most effective teachers in the classroom, and ask the least effective to find other lines of work. In a system like Chicago’s, where declining enrollment and excess capacity is going to force leaders to close dozens of schools, these closely held values—call them fairness versus meritocracy—are in direct conflict with one another. Happy talk about “collaboration” won’t sugarcoat that fact.

Conflict is unavoidable—at least if we want our politicians, school boards, and administrators to do the job that we must trust them to do on behalf of children, taxpayers, and the nation’s future.

-Mike Petrilli

The findings are described in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Peterson and co-authors William Howell and Martin R. West.

Read last year’s PEPG-EdNext survey report here.

So I watched the news last night with a worried eye after CNN told me that the exit polls in Wisconsin showed a tight race, with each candidate expected to get 50 percent of the vote.  Wow! I thought.  So all the polls leading up to election day were wrong.  Only the Democratic pollsters, Public Policy Polling, came close with their prediction that the race had tightened to within 3 points, indicating that either side could win.  Did our Education Next poll get it wrong?  Had the Wisconsin electorate shifted against the governor?  Had there been no shift against public sector unions after all?

In the days leading up to recall day, it seemed that Walker would win the race fairly easily, because Real Clear Politics (RCP), which calculates the average of all publicly reported polls, said that Walker had a 6.7 percent margin, and I had learned from earlier elections that the RCP average is better than any one poll at predicting the result.

So what was the final result?—a Walker win by 6.9 percent.  The RCP average was much, much better than the exit polls administered after the voters had cast their ballots!

Talk about a home run!  Congratulations to Real Clear Politics!

Never believe any particular poll (other than the Education Next poll, of course), but do believe the average of a bunch of polls.  Right now, the RCP average tells us Obama is leading Romney by 3 percentage points.  That number does not tell us what will happen on election day, but it does tell us that the incumbent president has a slight advantage today in a race that remains highly contested.

-Paul Peterson

Behind the Headline
The Public Weighs in on School Reform
Education Next  | Fall 2011

A new public opinion survey finds that the percentage of people taking a negative view of teacher unions is growing, with more of the public saying that that teacher unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Among teachers, the percent holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17% last year.The results from last year’s Education Next-PEPG poll appeared in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next.

Terry Moe was interviewed by Mike Petrilli for the Education Next book club podcast here.

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign earlier this year to significantly curtail the scope of bargaining for the state’s public employees, including teachers, set off a national debate over whether their long-established right to collectively bargain should be reined in, or even eliminated.

If you’re a Republican who wants to win elections, going after teachers unions makes parochial sense. According to Terry Moe, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave 95 percent of contributions to Democrats in federal elections between 1989 and 2010. “Collective bargaining is the bedrock of union well-being,” Moe notes, so to constrain collective bargaining is to weaken union power. The partisan nature of Walker’s campaign was revealed when he exempted two public-employee unions that supported him politically: those representing police and firefighters.

But polls suggest that Americans don’t want to see teachers and other public employees stripped of collective bargaining rights. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that by a margin of 61 to 33 percent, Americans oppose ending collective bargaining for public employees. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll discovered that while Americans want public employees to pay more for retirement benefits and health care, 77 percent said unionized state and municipal employees should have the same rights as union members who work in the private sector. Is the public wrong in supporting the rights of teachers and other public employees to collectively bargain? I don’t think so.

Richard D. Kahlenberg

The NEA has existed since 1857 and the AFT since 1916, but teachers didn’t have real influence until they began bargaining collectively in the 1960s. Before that, as Albert Shanker, one of the founding fathers of modern teachers unions, noted, teachers engaged in “collective begging.” Educators were very poorly compensated; in New York City, they were paid less than those washing cars for a living. Teachers were subject to the whims of often autocratic principals and could be fired for joining a union.

Some teachers objected to the idea of collective bargaining. They saw unions as organizations for blue-collar workers, not for college-educated professionals. But Shanker and others insisted that teachers needed collective bargaining in order to be compensated sufficiently and treated as professionals.

Democratic societies throughout the world recognize the basic right of employees to band together to pursue their interests and secure a decent standard of living. Article 23 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides not only that workers should be shielded from discrimination, but also that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

Collective bargaining is important, not only to advance individual interests but to give unions the power to serve as a countervailing force against big business and big government. Citing the struggle of Polish workers against the Communist regime, Ronald Reagan declared in a Labor Day speech in 1980, “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

The majority of Americans believe that citizens don’t give up the basic right to collective bargaining just because they work for the government. In free societies across the globe, from Finland to Japan, public school teachers have the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

In the United States, only seven states outlaw collective bargaining for teachers. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia authorize collective bargaining for such employees, and another nine permit it. It is no accident that the seven states that prohibit collective bargaining for teachers are mostly in the Deep South, the region of the country historically most hostile to extending democratic citizenship to all Americans.

Terry Moe finds that collective bargaining for teachers has strong support among candidates for school boards. He writes, “the vast majority of school board candidates, 66 percent, have positive overall attitudes toward collective bargaining. Even among Republicans—indeed, even among Republicans who are not endorsed by the unions—the majority take a positive approach to this most crucial of union concerns.”

Nonetheless, some (including Moe) would prefer that collective bargaining for teachers be severely curtailed, or even outlawed. Ironically, one argument advanced by critics is that collective bargaining is undemocratic. The other major argument is that teacher collective bargaining is bad for education. Both claims are without basis.

Those who argue that collective bargaining for teachers is stacked, even undemocratic, say that, unlike in the private sector, where management and labor go head-to-head with clearly distinct interests, in the case of teachers, powerful unions are actively involved in electing school board members, essentially helping to pick the management team. Moreover, when collective bargaining covers education policy areas, such as class size or discipline codes, the public is shut out of the negotiations, some assert. Along the way, they conclude, the interests of adults in the system are served but not the interests of children.

But these arguments fail to recognize that in a democracy, school boards are ultimately accountable to all voters, not just teachers, who often live and vote outside the district in which they teach, and in any event represent a small share of total voters. Union endorsements matter in school board elections, but so do the interests of general taxpayers and parents and everyone else who makes up the community. If school board members toe a teachers union line that is unpopular with voters, those officials can be thrown out in the next election.

Indeed, one could make a strong argument that any outsized influence that teachers unions exercise in school board elections provides a nice enhancement of democratic decisionmaking on education policy because teachers, as much as any other group in society, can serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote: schoolchildren. The interests of teachers and their unions don’t always coincide with those of students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. Certainly, the interests of teachers in ensuring adequate educational investment are far stronger than they are for most voters, who don’t have children in the school system and may be more concerned about holding down taxes than investing in the education of other people’s kids.

American society consistently underinvests in children compared with other leading democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United States is 21.6 percent, the fifth-highest among its 40 member nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child-poverty rates. Put differently, we’re in the bottom one-eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are connected with the interests of teachers, as they are on the question of public education spending, the U.S. ranks close to the top one-third. Among 39 OECD nations, the U.S. ranks 14th in spending on primary and secondary education as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Some critics argue that strong teachers unions make for inefficient spending and bad education policies in the instances when teacher and student interests diverge. For example, it is frequently claimed that teachers unions, through collective-bargaining agreements, protect incompetent members and prevent good teachers from being paid more.

This sometimes occurs, and when it does, it is troublesome. But a number of reform union leaders, going back to Al Shanker, have embraced “peer review” plans, which weed out bad teachers in Toledo, Ohio; Montgomery County, Maryland; and elsewhere. These reform plans put the lie to the notion that the average teacher has an interest in her union protecting incompetent colleagues. To the contrary, dead wood on the faculty makes every other teacher’s job more difficult. Likewise, numerous local unions have adopted pay-for-performance plans, when the measurement of performance is valid and incentives are in place to encourage good teachers to share innovative teaching techniques rather than hoarding them.

Moreover, many of the things that teachers collectively bargain for are good for kids. The majority of students benefit when teachers can more easily discipline unruly students, for example. (Principals, by contrast, often want to take a softer line so the school’s suspension rates don’t look bad.) Higher compensation packages attract higher-quality teacher candidates and reduce disruptive teacher turnover.

If collective bargaining were really a terrible practice for education, we should see stellar results where it does not occur: in the American South and in the charter school arena, for example. Why, then, aren’t the seven states that forbid collective bargaining for teachers (Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) at the top of the educational heap? Why do charter schools, 88 percent of which are nonunion, only outperform regular public schools 17 percent of the time, as a 2009 Stanford University study found? Why, instead, do we see states like Massachusetts, and countries like Finland, both with strong teachers unions, leading the pack?

Opponents of collective bargaining will immediately point out that poverty rates are high in the American South, and low in Finland, which is an entirely valid point. But doesn’t that suggest that the national obsession with weakening teachers unions may be less important than finding ways to reduce childhood poverty?

Moreover, scholarly studies that seek to control for poverty find that collective bargaining is associated with somewhat stronger, not weaker, student outcomes. Sociologist Robert Carini’s 2002 review of 17 studies found that “unionism leads to modestly higher standardized achievement test scores, and possibly enhanced prospects for graduation from high school.” Even Terry Moe, an outspoken opponent of collective bargaining for teachers (see “Seeing the Forest Instead of the Trees,” book reviews, page 77), suggests that research on the impact of collective bargaining on student outcomes “has generated mixed findings (so far) and doesn’t provide definitive answers.”

For a variety of reasons, collective bargaining for teachers should not be constrained, much less eliminated. Indeed, if teachers are to be partners in innovative education reform (see “A Different Role for Teachers Unions?” features, page 16), the scope of collective bargaining should be expanded. When the United Federation of Teachers first began to bargain collectively in the early 1960s, Albert Shanker was distressed that the New York City school board was willing to discuss only traditional issues like wages and benefits and rejected the idea of bargaining over broader policies that the union proposed, such as the creation of magnet schools.

Shanker saw that by reducing the scope of collective bargaining, critics created a political trap for unions. Union leaders were told they could only address bread-and-butter issues and then were criticized for caring only about their own selfish concerns rather than student achievement or larger policy issues. Moreover, Shanker believed that teachers had a lot of good ideas that could be incorporated into collective bargaining agreements, such as teacher peer review, suggestions for the types of curricula that work best in the classroom, and what sorts of programs would lure teachers into high-poverty schools. He also knew that reforms that draw on teacher wisdom are more likely to be effectively implemented when the classroom door closes.

In the end, Shanker’s frustration with the traditional constraints of collective bargaining spurred him to propose, in a 1988 speech at the National Press Club, the creation of “charter schools,” where teachers would draw upon a wealth of experience to try innovative ideas. Much to Shanker’s dismay, the charter school movement went in a very different direction, becoming a vehicle for avoiding unions and reducing teacher voice (and thereby increasing teacher turnover). And charters still educate a very small fraction of students.

Expanding collective bargaining for teachers to more states and to more education issues will give educators greater voice, and in so doing, indirectly strengthen the voice of students. Overall, the evidence suggests that Scott Walker has it exactly wrong, and the American public, which overwhelmingly supports the right to collective bargaining, has it right.

Jay P. Greene: Asking if teachers unions are a positive force in education is a bit like asking if the Tobacco Institute is a positive force in health policy or if the sugar lobby is helpful in assessing the merits of corn syrup. The problem is not that teachers unions are hostile to the interests of students and their families, but that teachers unions, like any organized interest group, are specifically designed to promote the interests of their own members and not to safeguard the interests of nonmembers. To the extent that teachers benefit from more generous pay and benefits, less-demanding work conditions, and higher job security, the unions will pursue those goals, even if achieving them comes at the expense of students. That is what interest groups do. Unfortunately, a public education system that guarantees ever-increasing pay and benefits while lowering work demands on teachers, who virtually hold their positions for life regardless of performance, harms students.

Collective bargaining is the primary vehicle through which the unions enact their preferred policies regarding pay, benefits, job security, and work conditions. It is also the mechanism by which unions collect fees from teachers that provide them with the resources to prevail politically. Until the ability of teachers unions to engage in collective bargaining is restrained, we should expect unions to continue to use it to advance the interests of their adult members over those of children, their families, and taxpayers.

Teachers unions only won the privilege of engaging in collective bargaining in the last 50 years, about when student achievement began to stagnate and costs to soar. A return to the pre–collective bargaining era may be the tonic our education system needs to return to growth in achievement and restraint in costs.

Jay P. Greene

The nature and function of organized interest groups is widely known and understood. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people organizing interest groups to advocate for themselves. That is an essential part of the freedom of assembly, protected by the U.S. Constitution. If people dislike what an interest group is advocating, they can organize other interest groups to compete in the marketplace of ideas and advocate for other concerns. The normal process of checks and balances among competing interest groups, however, has failed when it comes to education.

There are three factors that have contributed to the failure of other groups to check the power of teachers unions. First, there is an asymmetry in the ability of groups to organize in education, significantly favoring the teachers unions. Teachers unions have a huge advantage in organizing and advocating for their interests. Employees of the public school system are physically concentrated in school buildings, making it easier for them to organize. And because current employees are in a good position to know how they can benefit from the system, they can be mobilized relatively easily to advocate for those policies. Parents, taxpayers, and members of the general public are geographically dispersed, making it harder for them to organize. And because they are not immersed in education matters, they cannot easily envision how policy changes might help or hurt, making it harder to mobilize them on those issues. It is hardly unique to education that concentrated interests have an advantage over diffuse interests, but this is one factor contributing to teachers union dominance.

Second, teachers unions have fooled a large section of the general public and elites into thinking of them as something other than a regular interest group advocating for their own concerns.

The teachers unions have worked hard to convince people that they are a collection of educators who love our children almost as much as the parents do. They’re like the favorite aunt or uncle who dotes on our children. This image of the teachers unions as part of our family is facilitated by the fact that virtually every college-educated household (the households with the greatest political influence) has at least one current or former public school teacher sitting at the dining table when they gather for Thanksgiving. This impression is also fostered by ad campaigns featuring teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets and movie portraits of heroic teachers believing in students, even as their parents have abandoned them.

Of course, some teachers really do buy school supplies with their own money (which should make people wonder what kind of education system would make that necessary after spending an average of more than $12,000 per student each year). And some teachers really are like the doting aunt or uncle who sticks with kids, even when the parents have given up. But loving children and being part of the family is certainly not what teachers unions are about. They are about accumulating the power necessary to advocate for the interests of their members. In a moment of candor, Bob Chanin, former general counsel of the National Education Association, explained the key to the union’s effectiveness: “Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is NOT because of our creative ideas. It is NOT because of the merit of our positions. It is NOT because we care about children, and it is NOT because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.”

The disarming image of teachers unions as Mary Poppins has begun to morph into that of a burly autoworker, as teachers union advocacy has become more militant in recent years. As states attempt to trim very generous benefit packages for teachers, the unions have organized large demonstrations, occupied state capitols, and chanted angry slogans. The public image of teachers unions fighting like autoworkers for the benefit to retire at 55 with full medical coverage and 66 percent of their peak salary while the economy is in shambles and the quality of their industry stagnates has done much to undermine the doting aunt or uncle meme. The angry slogans emanating from Diane Ravitch’s and Valerie Strauss’s Twitter feeds may soothe disgruntled teachers, but they are eroding the public perception that teachers unions are somehow different from other interest groups. Media and policy elites are increasingly treating teachers union claims with the same skepticism that they used to apply only to other interest groups.

A third factor is that unions have significant influence over who is elected or appointed to negotiate with them over pay, benefits, and work conditions. In the private sector, the power of unions is constrained by the competing organized interests of management. When they sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, and work conditions, members of management are inclined to represent the interests of shareholders, not those of employees. But in education, as in other public-sector collective bargaining, the interests of employees are represented on both sides of the table. The employees, as citizens, can organize, finance, and vote for elected officials who favor the union’s interests. It is precisely for this reason that public employees historically did not have collective bargaining rights.

But didn’t the lack of collective bargaining rights sometimes leave teachers vulnerable to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment by school administrators? Yes, but unionization and collective bargaining were neither necessary nor efficient means of correcting those abuses. We can look to other public employees, such as members of the armed forces, who still do not have collective bargaining rights, to see how progress could have occurred without unionization. The military, like public schools, was once racially segregated. African American servicemen and servicewomen were treated horribly. And sometimes officers treated all soldiers in an arbitrary and unfair manner. These abuses were not corrected by unionization and collective bargaining in the military. They were corrected by executive orders and changing legislation governing those public employees. The same path could have been taken with public school employees without the political distortions that public employee unions introduce by virtue of having their interests represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

It may have taken longer than many would like to integrate the military, expand the roles of women in the armed forces, and end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but we were able to achieve all of those through an open, public process of changing laws and regulations. Unionized collective bargaining might also have addressed those issues, but it would have been done mostly behind closed doors and would have been accompanied by provisions to protect the narrow interests of the unions at the expense of the public interest. Perhaps the use of drones would have been restricted because it displaces jobs for Air Force pilots; perhaps there would be caps on the hours soldiers could engage in combat. Who knows what else a unionized military might have produced? The point is we rightly restrict the ability of members of the armed forces from unionizing and engaging in collective bargaining, just as we once did and could again for teachers. The claim that public employees have a “right” to unionize and collectively bargain and that exercising this “right” necessarily advances the public interest is obviously false.

The proper mechanism for improving compensation and work conditions in the public sector is through changes in law and regulation. The salary, benefits, job security, and work conditions of public employees are just as much a matter of public policy as the work that those employees are supposed to do. We don’t allow smoky backroom deals arrived at in collective bargaining to dictate the goals, structure, or existence of the public education system, so neither should we use that process to determine compensation and work condition policies.

What evidence is there that teachers unions have actually had negative effects on students and the education system? The research literature generally finds that unionization is associated with higher per-pupil costs and lower student achievement, but those findings are not very large and are sometimes inconsistent. A 1996 article by Caroline Hoxby in the Quarterly Journal of Economics is widely considered the most methodologically rigorous analysis of the issue. Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner described Hoxby’s study in a literature review prepared for the National Education Association as “the most sophisticated of the econometric attempts to isolate a union impact on the student results and school operations …” Hoxby finds that unionization is associated with higher student dropout rates as well as higher spending.

But the reality is that it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effects of teachers unions on education. For one thing, teachers unions are powerful and active almost everywhere. Even in states without collective bargaining, the unions push state legislatures to put into law what is normally put into collective bargaining agreements. This is less than ideal for the unions, because they don’t collect dues in exchange for pushing through legislation like they can for representing members to achieve the same ends through collective bargaining. Unions operate these money-losing operations in right-to-work states to make sure that there is no meaningful policy variation on their key issues. They’d rather that we not discover that the world does not end without a mandatory step-and-ladder pay scale, fair dismissal procedures, and favorable work rules. The lack of policy variation hinders researchers, because outcomes are not likely to be very different where the policies are not very different.

But we don’t need a wealth of evidence on teachers unions specifically as long as we know about the effects of interest groups and recognize that teachers unions are indeed interest groups. Seeking to produce evidence on the effects of each interest group separately, especially when there are empirical challenges to doing so, is a bit like trying to prove that gravity operates in every room of a house. We could drop a bowling ball in each room to see if it hits the floor, but sometimes there are tables, couches, or beds in the way. If we don’t get the result we expected, it doesn’t mean that gravity only applies in certain places; it just means that research constraints prevent us from seeing in a particular situation what we know to be true in general.

In general, we know that interest groups advocate for the benefits of their members, even if it comes at the expense of others. We know that teachers unions are interest groups. And we know that the interests of teachers unions are not entirely consistent with the needs of students and taxpayers. Thus, teachers unions are likely to be negative forces for the education system and certainly should not be seen as helpful. The most rigorous research that does exist bears this out, but we also know this from our more general knowledge of how interest groups affect policy.

It is not currently practical to forbid the unionization of teachers, as we forbid the unionization of members of the armed forces. But if we want to limit the ability of teachers unions to advance their own interests at the expense of children, their families, and taxpayers, we need to consider ways of restricting their ability to engage in collective bargaining. Restricting collective bargaining would force teachers unions to pursue their interests through the legislative process, where competing interests might have a better chance to check their power. And forcing unions to operate through legislation rather than backroom collective-bargaining negotiations would improve transparency, which could also place a check on the unions’ ability to satisfy their own interests at the expense of others.

RDK: Jay Greene’s opening line, comparing teachers unions to the Tobacco Institute, is very telling about his overall analysis. He’s right, of course, that both are “interest groups,” but does he not see a massive difference between an entity that is devoted to getting more kids addicted to deadly cigarettes so they’ll be lifelong clients and a group representing rank-and-file teachers whose life’s work is educating children?

Greene complains that teachers unions have become “more militant in recent years.” But teacher strikes, which were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s, dropped 90 percent by the mid-1980s and are now, as one education report noted, essentially “relics of the past.” To the extent that teachers have rallied, it’s in response to unprecedented attacks on them in places like Wisconsin, where a half century of labor law was radically rewritten. Astonishingly, Greene would go further than Wisconsin Republicans and “return to the pre–collective bargaining era.”

Greene says providing teachers with better pay and benefits is bad for kids, but where is his evidence? Don’t better compensation packages attract brighter talent, or are the laws of supply and demand suddenly suspended when it comes to teachers?

Finally, Greene is correct to suggest that teacher and student interests are not perfectly aligned, but who are the selfless adults who better represent the interests of kids? The hedge fund managers who support charter schools and also want their income taxed at lower rates than regular earned income, thereby squeezing education budgets? Superintendents who sometimes junk promising initiatives for which they cannot take credit? I’d rather place my faith in the democratically elected representatives of educators who work with kids day in and day out.

JPG: Richard Kahlenberg places his faith in “democratically elected representatives of educators,” that is, the teachers unions, to safeguard the interests of children. Note that he does not say the democratically elected representatives of the people, or the voters. Kahlenberg is perfectly comfortable with a school system whose policies and practices are dominated by its employees, not by the citizens who pay for it or by the families whose children are compelled to attend it. Rather than seeing a system controlled by its employees as one characterized by self-interested adults maximizing their benefits at the expense of children, Kahlenberg sees it as the ideal.

In my ideal vision, we would put our faith in parents, not teachers unions, to represent the interests of children. If we had a robust system of parental school choice, I would have no problem with teachers unions and collective bargaining. In the private sector, if unions ask for too much, at least they experience the natural consequences of destroying their own companies or industries (to wit, the auto industry). But in the public sector, unions are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of making unreasonable demands, since governments never go out of business. Public sector unions can drive total revenue for their industry higher without any improvements in productivity simply by getting public officials to increase taxes.

Unfortunately, we lack a robust system of school choice and instead have to rely on democratic institutions, like school boards and state legislatures, to determine most school policies and practices. But unless we also restrict the collective bargaining rights of school employees, teachers unions will dominate the decisions of those democratic institutions, given their advantages in funding and organization, to distort elections and policy decisions.

Teachers unions almost certainly raise salaries and benefits, as Kahlenberg suggests, but that doesn’t necessarily attract better teachers if the salary schedule does nothing to reward excellence. Similarly, union-imposed dismissal procedures make it virtually impossible to fire ineffective teachers. The alignment that Kahlenberg sees between teachers unions’ desire to increase education spending and the interests of students would only be a real concordance if the unions facilitated the use of those funds in ways that actually improved outcomes.

…Put another way, lopsided majorities voted to cut retirees’ pension benefits in a union-dominated state where Democrats have controlled the legislature since the eve of World War II.

The bill, which Governor Chafee is expected to sign next week, will face court challenges. Its enactment is a bitter, life-changing event for retirees and workers who spent their lives expecting a retirement benefit they now won’t get in full. And taxpayers are only avoiding far higher pension costs in the future, not saving huge sums.

Make no mistake, though: the bill is an extraordinary – and unlikely – achievement for the three leaders most responsible for shepherding it through: Chafee, House Speaker Gordon Fox and, most of all, Treasurer Gina Raimondo….

The lion’s share of the credit for the pension overhaul will go – justly – to the treasurer. The political newcomer and former financier is already winning glowing national media coverage, making her the darling of anti-pension warriors from coast to coast.

What that misses, though, is the nuance of her approach to the issue. Raimondo didn’t push to scrap defined-benefit pensions because like many experts, she thinks defined-contribution accounts alone don’t provide “retirement security.” She shined a bright spotlight on the funding shortfall and used her considerable speaking skills to push it to the top of the state’s agenda. She won over Chafee, lawmakers, the business community and many members of the public with her ideas for solving the problem. And she came up with a complicated plan that just may do the job.

As Nesi notes, the bill has real and painful consequences, especially for retirees who could see their annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) frozen for up to 19 years. Still, the the Rhode Island plan is thoughtful, comprehensive, and mostly succeeds in sharing the burden. Current teachers take on more risk. Taxpayers, although they pay less annually, pay over an extended term. Retirees bear the greatest load of all: as the years pass without a COLA, those with small pensions will see their buying power decrease.

Other states continue to ignore these issues or have tried to address pension shortfalls through gimmicks or delays. Some, like Illinois, slashed the pensions of new teachers and will use the contributions of these teachers to subsidize current teachers and retirees — in effect robbing the future by making it more difficult to recruit new teachers. And others want to use shortfalls as an excuse to try to gut public employee benefits altogether.

Rhode Island’s political courage offers an important example, not only to pension problem-solvers in statehouses, but also to those in our nation’s capital trying to solve another massive financial dilemma.

PHOTO: Ms Marianne Heikkikä teaches physics in Tikkurila High School in Vantaa, Finland

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

In the United States, the modern labor union grew out of bitter strife between workers and owners in the early years of the 20th century. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. Modern labor relations date from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which modified the Wagner Act mainly by defining the rights of employers in the framework it had provided. These laws applied only to workers in the private sector.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts reflected the mass-production systems that the United States embraced more fully than any other industrial nation. In this arrangement, management figured out how the work was going to get done; workers were regarded as interchangeable; and skilled craftsmanship was minimized. The “skill” was in the machine, not the person operating it. And because the work was largely unskilled, pay was low.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts gave workers the right to organize to bargain for wages and working conditions. They also obligated the unions to defend their members against management when conflicts arose. The assumption was that the relationship between the union and management would be adversarial; the laws provided the rules under which that adversarial relationship would be conducted. Courts later ruled that the unions and management could not collaborate.

In northern Europe at that time, the mass-production system was not so widely embraced, the era of the craftsman did not abate, and work was less routinized and rule-bound than in the United States.

After World War II, management and owners in many Western European countries wanted to deny communism any opportunity to gain ground among workers, and so they gave labor a seat at the table. Thus three “social partners”—government, labor, and management—would frame social policy together, as equals. In many countries, the law also provided for work councils made up of workers elected by their peers at the firm level to adjust the national agreement to local conditions.

Indeed, in countries with labor parties in Europe today, it is not unusual for the labor party, when in power, to put a brake on wage growth in order to forestall inflation, or to resist calls for more benefits when productivity growth does not justify increased benefits.

In many European countries, by law, workers sit on the boards of directors of major firms. When that happens, workers sometimes offer to hold wages steady or even reduce them if management agrees to invest the savings in capital or in research and development. Workers understand that if the firm cannot make the investments required to be more competitive, it may resort to layoffs.

Senior European executives are often puzzled when their American counterparts talk about a desire to greatly weaken or even eliminate trade unions. The Europeans, while often eager to acquire more power vis-à-vis their unions, do not generally talk about eliminating them. They view the unions as an instrument for giving a voice to a key sector of the society. They generally believe that if labor were not provided a voice through the union, it might eventually become a direct threat to democratic capitalism.

The Case of American Teachers

Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an alliance of educators, not a teachers union. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, had always been a union, but it was much smaller, and not particularly militant. But, during the ’60s, teachers’ compensation declined significantly relative to that of other occupations requiring a similar level of education. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening. As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union.

The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency. This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level.

In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector. Some of these provisions simply made a teacher’s life a little easier, like lunchtime free of student responsibilities. But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.

Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the 1920s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.

In the case of the schools, management’s attorneys, like management’s attorneys everywhere, saw these demands as reasonable, because they were easy to administer and cost the district no money. But the organizational costs were substantial. Although the unions knew this, the school boards’ attorneys apparently did not. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.

Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example. So the unions and the boards often settled their differences by negotiating changes in “working conditions,” thereby avoiding teacher strikes.

When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members. Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue.

Over the course of several decades, teachers unions in the United States progressively constrained management’s ability to select staff, promote staff, deploy staff, discipline staff, train staff, and let staff go when they were not doing the job. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees. Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs. So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile. In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor.

Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize. Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals.

The Collaborative Model

These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.

The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford. But as the unions come under increasing assault, teachers see themselves being blamed for system failures that should be attributed to others, including school boards, parents who are not supporting their children’s learning, and politicians who preside over a society in which an ever-greater number of students come to school unprepared to learn. It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the 1960s.

It does not have to be this way.

Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.

In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers. The result was a highly polarized environment, with teachers resorting to strikes and lockouts to defend what they could of their prerogatives, and no improvement in student performance.

The administration that took office in 2003 reversed course. Premier Dalton McGuinty took the view that he was not going to get the kind of student performance he was looking for if he did not have the trust and confidence of the teachers, and he would never gain their trust by continuing the war that the previous administration had begun. He and his top aides spent a lot of time to talking with teachers in classrooms and school lunchrooms. They brought teachers and their unions to the table for discussions of education reform strategy and won their trust by listening hard to what the teachers had to say and then providing the needed support. The reform strategy that they adopted assumed that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the capacity to do it. So the McGuinty government focused on building that capacity. By trading trust for manifest distrust, the McGuinty government laid the base for the collaborative relationship with teachers and their unions that it saw as the prerequisite for improving student performance.

American Translation

What can one reasonably conclude from this comparative description of the development of unions in the United States and northern Europe and the approaches taken to reform in Canada and Finland?

My conclusion is that the current impulse to curtail the influence of the teachers unions may return some powers to management that over the years have gravitated to the unions. But that victory is likely to come at the price of deeply alienating many teachers from the larger cause of education reform.

Teachers know that if they lose their unions during a fiscal crisis, they will have no protection at all as long as state and local officials face enormous pressure to cut teaching jobs, compensation, and benefits. A determined, widespread effort to weaken or destroy the institution teachers are counting on to protect them economically will force them into retirement or to hunker down and wait in brooding resentment for a change in the political weather.

As we have seen, this is precisely what happened when they came under a similar attack in Ontario, Canada. That is hardly a formula for successful education reform.

The alternative is the one taken by Ontario’s premier McGuinty: convince the teachers that they have the trust of government and enlist their unions in seeking to improve student performance. As the Ontario case shows, this does not mean that government has to give the unions whatever they want. McGuinty certainly did not do that: He made it clear where his bottom lines were. He insisted on a strong curriculum, competitive standards, and new assessments that matched them. And he was not about to break the bank.

But he invited the teachers and their unions to the table. He listened to them with respect. Where they told him that they needed support to improve outcomes for students, he supplied it wherever he could. The mutual trust that grew out of this relationship persuaded the teachers and unions to make concessions that they would never have willingly made under savage attack.

Reforming the Contract

Management will have to revisit the provisions of the contracts that school boards have negotiated over the years. Concessions will be necessary on unfunded retirement plans and on the use of seniority to govern many aspects of school-district operations. The more-or-less-unexamined move to apply the structures of the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act to the public sector needs to be reassessed. State labor legislation that mimics national labor law in its insistence on a confrontational stance between management and labor should be rewritten.

Getting to where these issues can be productively addressed requires first a relationship of trust between government and labor. Each side says that experience has taught them not to trust the other party, and so each states that trust depends on the other side making the first concessions. Someone has to go first.

Some will argue that the possibilities represented by the European model are simply not available in the United States. But our politics are not so different from those of Canada. The idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is so different from the rest of the world that lessons learned elsewhere do not apply here—had a certain allure when we were far ahead of our competitors. But it is very dangerous for a country that is falling further and further behind.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, November 2011).

While this may all feel like success to the teacher unions, I suspect that it is actually breeding failure.  The unions succeed by intimidating politicians with their raw power while convincing the public that teacher unions love their children almost as much as the parents do.  Maintaining this double-game is essential because it disarms parents, media elites, and others who might otherwise mobilize against teacher unions and apply their own direct pressure to politicians.

As long as teacher unions act like Mary Poppins to parents, media elites, and others, the general public is willing to suspend their normal inclination to desire choice and competition in the goods and services they consume.  Mary Poppins is an extension of the family and we don’t apply market principles to our family.  The family is a refuge from the rough and tumble of the market which is instead governed by a sense of mutual obligations and affection.  Where the family ends, the market begins and people think the market needs choice and competition to stay healthy.

But when the public face of the teacher unions is the Army of Angry Teachers, they no longer seem like Mary Poppins and begin to look a lot more like longshoremen beating their opponents with metal pipes.  Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss may provide psychological comfort to angry teachers (some of whom seem so irate that they may need professional psychological help to manage their anger), but it undermines the double-game that is at the heart of the teacher union strategy.

Giant mobs of yelling protesters and blogs filled with tirades may increase the intimidation politicians feel, but it seriously undermines the image of teachers as an extension of our family.  And as that Mary Poppins image is significantly eroded, media elites and the general public will increasingly think of education as something in the marketplace that requires choice and competition.  And this erosion is extremely hard for teacher unions to reverse.

What feels like success to angry teachers is actually sowing the seeds of failure for the teacher union.

-Jay P. Greene

To me, it looked like two key fault lines ran through the discussion. One was the notion of “reform unionism” and professional voice. The second was how to judge whether schools or teachers were doing well. Moe, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, thinks “reform unionism” is a pipe dream and that the only effective way to drive school improvement is by getting the system incentives to emphasize performance–which requires measures of student learning. Meier argued that collaboration has repeatedly proven successful, in locales such as New York’s district four, and that it has been management and policymakers who have squelched it. She rejected the notion that test scores measure learning in a useful fashion, and noted that Moe’s critiques of teacher evaluation or tenure all rest on the notion that test scores can usefully measure teacher performance. Harding praised Moe’s efforts to talk about union incentives and behavior, accepted the notion that test scores are useful measures of learning, and suggested we can all “put our heads in our hands over the state of [teacher] contracts.” But she also confessed to a “soft spot” for collaboration, expressed faith that districts and unions could collaborate to drive achievement, and cautioned that reformers eager to reduce the role of unions need to “be careful” about finding ways to “replace important protections” for teachers.

If you haven’t seen Moe’s 500-page tome, it’s worth a careful look. The result of a decade’s worth of scholarship, it assembles a wealth of data on teacher attitudes, collective bargaining, union influence on school board elections, NEA and AFT political activity, and so on. Yesterday, Moe sketched the book’s argument, saying, “Teacher unions are the most powerful force in American education…from the bottom up and the top down.” He said that fully understanding this dynamic is essential to making sense of why education policy “has been such a disappointment for a quarter century,” because schools are organized like they are largely due to the pressures exerted by teacher unions.

Perhaps Moe’s most intriguing assertion is that both union leaders and would-be reformers routinely mischaracterize union sentiment: union leaders when they say they’re seeking to protect students and would-be reformers when they charge that callous union bosses are ignoring the wishes of their membership. Rather, Moe argued, “Members expect union leaders to protect their jobs [and perks]…and union leaders need to do these things if they are to stay union leaders.” He said, “Leaders are going to protect union member job interests come hell or high water, even if these lead them to do things that are bad for kids or for schools.” This isn’t because union leaders are foisting an agenda on teachers, but because they are responding to teachers’ common, fundamental concerns. He noted that none of this means that union members or union leaders are bad and that, as individuals, they likely want what’s best for kids. But, he argued, the logic of unionization trumps those individual concerns. While he sees great value in “teachers having voice,” the “dilemma” is that when teachers organize to make their voice heard, it becomes “about job interests and not just voice anymore.”

Moe offered a bleak prognosis for “reform unionism,” deeming it wishful thinking. He said that those who put their faith in such reforms are “expecting cats to bark,” and argued that the logic of any collaboration is that union partners will try to “minimize departures from the norm.” He also argued that Republican efforts to curtail union power in the states are unlikely to make much headway. In the longer term, Moe sees two trends that will reduce union influence. One is the “ferment” in the Democratic party, with reformers like the Democrats for Education Reform “put[ting] unions on the defensive.” The second is technological change. Echoing a point that he and John Chubb argued in Liberating Learning, Moe said that technology will reduce the need for labor, that online learning will lead to teachers being more geographically dispersed, and that new tools will lead to a proliferation of new school options–all of which will cost unions members, dues, and influence.

Meier argued that Moe credited teacher unions with far too much influence. She argued that schools have always been infused by rules that stifle sensible practice, and that that these rules were historically imposed by management. She observed that in St. Louis, in 1950, a married woman could not teach and that, in Chicago, she could not have taught if she looked pregnant. She argued that unions have tried to address “the shameful history of how teachers were treated.” She argued that doctors are not regarded as a “special interest” but are listened to when they speak with professional consensus, and asked why the unions are treated any differently. Indeed, she said that “healthy civilizations respect seniority and age,” and argued that policies which advantage veteran teachers are defensible on those grounds.

She said she’s perplexed by efforts to cut teacher benefits. She said, “I’m a retired teacher, collecting two-thirds of my teaching salary [in a pension]. I run into people with 3.2 million dollar bonuses. To begrudge me my two-thirds of salary, that’s shameful. It’s what the middle class was supposed to be.” She also challenged Moe’s notion that others pay more attention than the union to the needs of the students. “Who puts the interests of the children first?” she asked. She said it’s not the nation, which “ranks at the bottom on child welfare.” She asked, “When we decided not to tax the rich the way they should have been, was that because they were thinking about American children?” And, she asked, what are we producing high schools graduates for, anyway? “There are no jobs,” she said. “Companies move locations, pick up a factory here and move over there without thinking about the children.”

There was plenty more, with Harding frequently occupying the ground between these two forceful voices. Ultimately, I think two clear patches of common ground emerged. One was agreement that schools have indeed been larded with destructive rules by pols and management. Moe happily conceded the point, noting that schools occupy the bottom rung of “a democratic hierarchy,” reminding the audience why he has long advocated for choice-based reform. He agreed with Meier that management has long been inept and unproductive, but argued that this has been due to incentives–and that he thinks that’s entirely consistent with his assertion that teacher unions are having the biggest and most destructive impact on schools today. Second, there was clear agreement about the value of teacher professionalism and voice, with Harding flagging the promise of new organizations intended to give teachers a voice in policy. The question was really about how that voice can and should be channeled.

Anyway, a lot was said, and space and time limit what I’ve been able to touch upon. If you’re curious, pop over here and check it out for yourself.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

The headline story has been fiscal issues – salaries, retirement and health benefits, and the bargains agreed to by legislatures past.  But these issues have morphed into issues more fundamentally threatening to the unions – the right to strike, the ability to bargain about nonsalary issues, and the like.  In response, the teachers unions have mounted a concerted counter-attack aimed at restoring their prior position.

The fiscal issues are important, but I do not think they are the most important ones.  In a recent article in Education Next, “Valuing Teachers,” I presented evidence about the huge economic impacts of highly effective teachers.  A parallel calculation also reveals the huge costs to highly ineffective teachers.  To me, this is what we should be talking about.  The quality of our teaching force determines the level of student achievement, and student achievement directly determines how our economy will develop in the long run.

I argue elsewhere that the teacher unions would be better off getting in front of the teacher quality issue.  The low public regard for teacher unions is, I would argue, a result of public perceptions that concern for student outcomes ranks very low relative to the income, convenience, and preferences of the teachers themselves.  The public – generally very supportive of teachers – does not understand union positions that over-protect the small number of teachers who are harming kids.  The unions can try to rebuild their image (while doing good for America) by actively participating in efforts to figure out how to evaluate teachers and how schools can make personnel decisions based on those evaluations.

But, it should also be recognized that others in the schools are not innocent.  First, the current fiscal problems of school systems, with excessive retirement and health packages, were the result of prior agreements by legislatures, administrators, and school boards.  They were not unilaterally imposed by the unions.

Second, even in states without collective bargaining, there are precious few decisions made on the basis of teacher effectiveness.    There is scant evidence that performance in states without collective bargaining is better than in states with strong collective bargaining.

Returning to the opening question:  what should the current discussions be about?  They should, in my mind, focus on how the incentives, rules, and actions can be arranged to ensure that there is indeed an effective teacher in every classroom.  This in turn really means focusing on student learning.

The unions have to quit defending the worst of the worst.  The majority of very good teachers need to quit tolerating the few bad teachers in their midst. The administrators have to quit hiding behind the “it’s all the unions’ fault” slogan and figure out how to evaluate teachers and to use that information in pay and retention decisions.  The districts must hold administrators responsible for their decisions and set incentives for them that parallel those for teachers.  The legislatures must reward districts for getting it right, not for getting it wrong.

The switch to a focus on student outcomes would be a dramatic change for all parties.  And, returning to my underlying motivation, whether or not we can do this will have a lot to say about the future economic well-being of America.  The contrasting futures of America with and without improvement of our schools are dramatically different.

-Eric Hanushek

In that spirit, I strongly encourage you to read Richard Kahlenberg‘s brilliant 2007 biography of Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal. Or, if you don’t have time to tackle its 500 pages, listen to this 45-minute interview with Kahlenberg instead. (It’s the third offering of the Education Next Book Club, a new long-form podcast that I’m hosting. Previous editions featured Richard Whitmire on The Bee Eater and Dan Willingham on Why Don’t Students Like School?)

What struck me most about the book was the status of the teaching profession before Shanker and his colleagues won the right to collectively bargain in 1960. Teachers made the same wages as car washers; autocratic principals harassed teachers on a daily basis; and teachers could be fired on a whim. I was also fascinated by the story of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy—whereby black leaders demanding “community control” wanted to fire many white, Jewish teachers—and the scars it might leave in terms of teachers’ psychology around job protections.

Of course, things are much better for teachers today, what with much higher (if still mediocre) salaries, generous benefits, and over-the-top job security. So I can certainly understand, a la Wisconsin, teachers’ fears of going back to the bad old days. (I can also acknowledge that the current era isn’t necessarily the good ole’ days either, what with policymakers constantly getting in teachers’ business, a bureaucratic system that excels at making inane and annoying decisions, and plenty of administrators who can’t manage their way out of a paper bag.)

As a child of the 1980s, the union rhetoric around teachers’ “voice” and “rights” and “solidarity” never made much sense to me. I’m much more drawn to discussions of “effectiveness” and “innovation” and “flexibility.” But reading this biography of Shanker—which is in many respects a history of the teacher-union movement—reminded me that for plenty of people, this rhetoric is heartfelt. Maybe there are a few union leaders who are fat cats out to protect their privileges. But I suspect that most of them—even the ones most dead set against reform—are merely operating out of a set of assumptions that go back to the 1950s. And if we reformers don’t understand those assumptions and why they made sense at one time, we’ll never be able to change their minds.

—Mike Petrilli

Antonucci makes a compelling argument to buttress his case that the NEA has reason to go to war in the face of the recent existential skirmishes.  After several decades of membership increases (making it the largest union in America) and “a virtually non-stop expansion of the scope of public sector collective bargaining,” he reports, NEA numbers are down in 43 states. And, he says, “the union faces a $14 million budget shortfall…”

Here’s the battle cry, according to Antonucci:

`We are at war,’ incoming NEA executive director John Stocks told the union’s board of directors last month, outlining a plan to keep NEA from joining the private sector industrial unions in a slow, steady decline into irrelevancy to anyone outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. And like any good war plan for an army under siege, it allows for a defense-in-depth while preparing for a decisive counterattack.

Antonucci is by no means draping any coffins here. The NEA  “is still a political powerhouse, and will not be content with lying against the ropes, being pummeled by Republicans,” he reports.  And “despite its budget shortfall and freeze on executive pay, the national union is flush with cash, and aims to double the size of its political war chest. The bulk of this money will go to the state affiliates, though the national union will have a larger hand in how it is disbursed.”

Read EIA’s full report here.

–Peter Meyer

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The state’s hard-and-fast seniority rule—last hired, first fired—provided Cleveland school officials with little wiggle room for deciding which teachers had to go. Among the first were a number of teachers who had been handpicked to staff the district’s 10 new “innovation” schools. Ann Mullin, senior program officer for education at Cleveland’s George Gund Foundation, told the city’s Plain Dealer, “There’s something wrong when a state law forces removal of teachers without regard to their effectiveness in the classroom.”

Across the country, many cash-strapped districts fretting over likely layoffs are eyeing seniority rules as they hammer out new contracts. To the surprise of some district superintendents, contract negotiations are not likely to offer much relief. In fact, when it comes to seniority rules, and many other core aspects of teachers’ employment, the contract is not the problem. State law is. In Ohio’s case, state law dictates that teachers on continuing contracts and those with greater seniority should have preference, language that is effectively emulated in 14 other states in the country. While teacher contracts may flesh out the details of school rules and rights of teachers, states are in the driver’s seat. Local control—although it is still brandished when expedient—is today more myth than reality, at least when it comes to matters involving teachers.

The contract certainly still plays a big role in determining a teacher’s pay, work schedule, and benefits, but the power behind the policies with the most impact on teacher quality, such as tenure and performance assessment, lies with states. That power has steadily increased over the decades, especially in recent years, as federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have pushed states to assume more authority over education.

Special Interest

What best explains increasing legislative involvement in teacher governance is the rise of teachers unions. The public-sector labor movement took hold in the second half of the 20th century when, in the face of poor working conditions and low wages, unions began lobbying for collective bargaining rights. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order that allowed federal workers to bargain collectively, and one by one states followed, affording unions substantial bargaining power by the mid-1970s.

As unions matured, their leaders realized that it is more efficient to lobby state legislatures on particular workplace provisions than to negotiate the conditions into hundreds of individual contracts. And once the stipulations are passed, there is generally no clock ticking on a law’s expiration as there would be if the provision were part of a collective bargaining agreement.

For a number of reasons, the unions have had considerable success in passing teacher-friendly legislation in spite of frequent opposition from school districts in a state or even the department of education. Because union interests are narrowly defined (unlike, for instance, those of the business community), teachers unions can go after an issue with laserlike focus, and they are quite adept at drawing on the public’s generally supportive view of teachers. Unions are highly effective lobbyists in part because, unlike many advocacy groups, they are membership organizations (for the nation’s largest profession). Whereas other groups typically rely on grants and donations, unions collect a steady stream of income from member dues and are flush with discretionary funds, which can be used to build campaign war chests and contribute to lobbying efforts (see “The Long Reach of Teachers Unions,” features). State union affiliates typically have full-time paid staff devoted to producing a successful outcome from the legislature. In cases of ballot initiatives, unions have a bloc of votes they can count on should they need to press for one outcome or another. Unions are a force that legislators want to cultivate, as much as the unions want to cultivate the legislators. Each ignores the other at its peril.

To see just where union efforts lead in practical terms, one only need look at campaign finance disclosures. The California Teachers Association (CTA), for example, was the state’s largest political spender in the last decade, devoting $212 million to ballot measures, campaigns, and lobbying. It’s no surprise then that during that time, California legislators voted down measures for reforms such as differentiated teacher compensation and the use of student achievement data in teacher evaluations.

Only recently have education advocacy organizations entered the scene, pushing agendas that are distinct from those of the unions, most notably Connecticut’s ConnCAN, Advance Illinois, Florida’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, and various state chapters of Democrats for Education Reform. These groups appear to be a growing force in state legislatures, particularly, though not only, because of the Race to the Top initiative dangling money before states to spur reform. In 2009, ConnCAN had a hand in overhauling teacher certification requirements in Connecticut, securing approval for alternative routes to certification like the Teach For America program, a legislative change fought tooth and nail by the teachers union. No legislative success, however, trumps that achieved in Colorado in May 2010. The perfect storm—a charismatic, Democratic legislator who is a Teach For America alumnus, the lure of Race to the Top funds, and a whole array of advocacy groups that included the Colorado chapters of Democrats for Education Reform and Stand For Children—pulled off teacher legislation that was bitterly opposed by the state union and which no one dreamed possible a year ago.

State Clout

The involvement by states in teacher employment issues is largely unknown, not just to the general public, but to policymakers themselves. A look at state laws reveals a surprisingly high level of intervention into the most important concerns of teachers:

Evaluations: Although school districts, rather than states, employ teachers, nearly every state has something to say about how and how often teachers must be evaluated. All but eight states determine the minimum frequency of teacher evaluations. Districts technically have the leeway to exceed the minimum set by the state, though they rarely do. The minimum therefore becomes the de facto maximum. Since the announcement of Race to the Top, several states have increased the frequency of evaluations for tenured teachers to at least once a year; 19 states now mandate that all teachers receive a performance review annually.

Many states also decide what the evaluation instrument must look like, or what its components must be, and whether student performance can factor into a teacher’s evaluation rating. Thirty-one states either determine the evaluation instrument a district must use, require state approval for district evaluation instruments, or provide explicit guidance. Twenty-one states now have data systems that match individual teacher records with student records. In a direct effort to compete in Race to the Top, California, Nevada, Indiana, and Wisconsin have eliminated obstacles to using student performance data in teacher evaluations. In California, the law had been in the making since the 1980s, but stalled repeatedly as a result of infighting among state agencies and a lack of political support. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The new bill removed one of the system’s key limitations—it set aside a 2006 state law that, at the insistence of teachers unions, prevented California from using the system to evaluate teachers based on the academic gains of their students.”

Tenure: There are two kinds of teachers: those with tenure (also known as “continuing contract” status) and those without it (those on a “probationary” or “provisional” contract). A veteran teacher with tenure receives preferential treatment over newer teachers in school assignments and with respect to layoffs and dismissal procedures. Tenure may also play a role in how frequently a teacher is evaluated. In Virginia, for example, nontenured teachers are evaluated annually, whereas tenured teachers can expect a performance review every three years.

Tenure is hugely important to teachers. Yet look at any contract and you’ll see that very little is said about it, particularly about the process by which it is conferred. The language isn’t there because states, not districts, decide when teachers should be eligible for tenure. All 50 states have tenure laws, but only about one-third of the largest districts even mention tenure in their contracts.

State laws are responsible for making tenure a relatively automatic milestone, which, depending on the state, is awarded after one year (in Mississippi and Hawaii) or following as many as seven years of service (in Ohio), but most often in only three years. If state laws put any other condition on a teacher’s eligibility for tenure, it is usually a record of satisfactory evaluations, a benchmark that all but a tiny fraction of teachers meet. The New Teacher Project’s recent report, The Widget Effect, noted that in the 12 school districts it examined, less than 1 percent of all teachers had received an unsatisfactory evaluation, even in schools where students were chronically underperforming. Louisiana state law illustrates the relative ease in earning tenure: “Such probationary teacher shall automatically become a regular and permanent teacher in the employ of the school board of the parish or city, as the case may be, in which he has successfully served his three-year probationary term.”

Theoretically, a district can impose a more rigorous tenure requirement than that established by the state, but not without great difficulty. In 2007, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein sought to change the process for awarding teachers tenure, allowing student data to be factored into that decision. The local teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), strongly opposed the change. The UFT took the fight to the state legislature, as state law precluded locals from having any say on tenure matters. Joining forces with the powerful state teachers union, the UFT succeeded in blocking Klein’s tenure changes by embedding a provision in the 2008–09 budget that made it illegal to consider a teacher’s job performance as a factor in the tenure process.

Compensation: Though school districts negotiate with their unions the exact amount of pay at each step of the salary table, states often decide when teachers receive pay increases and by what criteria. Half of all states have specific salary regulations that school districts must respect. Of those, 17 spell out the terms under which districts must provide teacher raises, including that teachers must be provided a raise if they earn a master’s degree, or two, or even three. The love affair that states have with master’s degrees really cannot be justified, as no study of any repute has ever found that these degrees make teachers more effective, particularly when the degrees are earned in education.

Increasingly, states are supporting performance pay initiatives, with the latest tally at 19 states. However, by the time these initiatives make their way down to the individual teacher, the bonuses tend to be on the paltry side. Because wholly new sources of money have to be identified to fund these pay experiments—they cannot draw on the many millions of dollars dedicated to rewarding teachers for master’s degrees—these efforts fail to have much of an impact.

Dismissal: While teacher contracts often lay out the steps a district must take to help a teacher who is struggling, contracts rarely account for those teachers whose performance does not improve, even after they receive additional support and professional development.

States, meanwhile, offer a detailed set of policies for how to handle dismissal. Half of the states set forth specific dismissal procedures, including the number and nature of appeals a teacher or union may file, the compensation a teacher may earn during the appeals process, and whether a teacher is allowed to stay in the classroom during this period. It has been well documented that dismissal procedures are time-intensive, often taking two to three years to complete. California’s dismissal process includes 10 different steps, which perhaps explains why just 100 dismissal hearings were held in the state between 1996 and 2005, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Part of the reason these procedures are so complicated is that teachers have rights to appeal that effectively treat the district’s dismissal as a threat to a teacher’s licensure. These laws fail to distinguish between dismissal based on poor performance and dismissal resulting from criminal or moral infractions. Most states allow a teacher to appeal a district’s decision to dismiss at least twice. Washington State goes even further: not only can a teacher appeal a principal’s decision to the local school board; the board’s decision can be appealed all the way to the state supreme court.

Promise of State Role

Without question, some elements of teacher governance remain the purview of the local district and teachers union. But states play an outsized role in structuring the scope, nature, and specifics of contracts, even before union leaders and school superintendents reach the bargaining table. Enactment of education policy at the state level is a boon for the unions as long as the policy runs in their favor. But the rise of education advocacy groups bears watching, as in some instances they have broken a virtual union monopoly on the policymaking process.

Prior to the flurry of unprecedented activity by states competing for Race to the Top, states’ teacher policies were, on the whole, a mixed bag. Now, even when the legislative goals are relatively progressive, the final language may provide a strong foothold for the status quo. For instance, while Nebraska recently passed a performance pay law, if 75 percent of Nebraska’s school districts do not adopt the plans in their contracts within five years, the law goes away. It will not matter that some districts want to participate. In the 2008–09 school year, Florida state policy required that evidence of student learning be the primary criterion for teacher evaluation, yet 99 percent of all Florida teachers were rated satisfactory. This (and Race to the Top) prompted state legislators to craft an even stricter law that required fully half of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on students’ test performance; the union put up a fight and Governor Charlie Crist vetoed the measure.

Although the legislature is traditionally where policy is enacted, state school chiefs have always had considerable authority—but either they were unaware or not inclined to use it. That may be changing, and nowhere is this development more striking than in Rhode Island. Seventeen years into his tenure but just a few months before retirement, Peter McWalters took on that state’s famously strong union, voiding teachers’ seniority rights in the troubled Providence school district. While the action was widely cheered by reformers, many reformers were also asking why it was so long in coming and why so unique among states. By contrast, current state commissioner of education Deborah Gist has not wasted any time, only a few months into her tenure issuing a directive to superintendents to stop transferring teachers into new jobs on the basis of seniority, mandating instead that vacancies be filled based on a set of performance criteria and on student need. This directive trumps locally bargained contracts and inserts the state into an area long viewed as one that districts and their local unions must work out at the negotiating table.

Superintendents who, like Gist, are directly appointed by a reform-minded governor are more likely to be given the leeway to take bolder stances. Superintendents directly elected by voters, as is the case in 14 states, are probably less likely to take these risks. Still, not only has Gist set an example that other state superintendents can follow, but the promise of Race to the Top has emboldened at least some of the more cautious superintendents. One of the nation’s longest serving school chiefs, Nancy Grasmick, willingly took on the Maryland legislature in order to be more competitive in Race to the Top, using her regulatory power to interpret a new state law on teacher evaluation much differently than the union-friendly legislature intended.

For state superintendents and legislatures, being on the side of reform is no longer such lonely ground on which to stand. They are backed by a growing legion of education advocacy organizations that are proving to be a forceful—and politically savvy—counterweight to the unions. The question is whether states will remain emboldened over the long haul or whether they will back down in the face of union opposition. But given the spate of state reforms this past spring, the future looks considerably more optimistic than even a year ago. State involvement promises to raise standards for the teaching profession to a degree that would be impossible for districts at the bargaining table.

Emily Cohen is district policy director at the National Council on Teacher Quality, of which Kate Walsh is president.

If you think it’s far-fetched to suggest that a teachers union could play the role of political kingmaker, think again. The largest political campaign spender in America is not a megacorporation, such as Wal-Mart, Microsoft, or ExxonMobil. It isn’t an industry association, like the American Bankers Association or the National Association of Realtors. It’s not even a labor federation, like the AFL-CIO. If you combine the campaign spending of all those entities it does not match the amount spent by the National Education Association, the public-sector labor union that represents some 2.3 million K–12 public school teachers and nearly a million education support workers (bus drivers, custodians, food service employees), retirees, and college student members. NEA members alone make up more than half of union members working for local governments, by far the most unionized segment of the U.S. economy.

The Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics joined forces last year to produce the first comprehensive database of political campaign spending at both the state and national levels. The results should open the eyes of policymakers and educators alike, as well as those involved in the wider world of domestic politics. In the 2007–08 election cycle, total spending on state and federal campaigns, political parties, and ballot measures exceeded $5.8 billion. The first-place NEA spent more than $56.3 million, $12.5 million ahead of the second-place group. That’s not all. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the smaller of the two national professional education unions, ranked 25th in campaign spending, with almost $12 million, while NEA/AFT collaborative campaigns spent an additional $3.4 million, enough to earn the rank of 123rd. All told, the two national teachers unions distributed $71.7 million on candidate and issue campaigns from California to Florida, Massachusetts to South Dakota. Millions more went to policy research to support the unions’ agenda.

The teachers unions outspent their union peers by a large margin. The next highest-spending public sector union is ranked at number 5: the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) contributed some $35 million. The AFL-CIO’s largest member union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), at less than half the size of NEA, spent about $21 million and ranked 11th.

A Long Arm

With such large sums of cash in hand, NEA can involve itself in a wide variety of campaigns in many states without diluting its efforts in any single one of them. During the 2008–09 school year, the national union sent a total of $17.3 million to 24 state affiliates, both large and small. In the case of the large affiliates, this money merely supplements what the affiliate raises on its own. According to a 2010 report by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, 15 organizations spent a combined $1 billion on state campaigns and ballot measures from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2009. The California Teachers Association (CTA) was the biggest political spender over the period, disbursing nearly $212 million. That’s almost double that of the second place spender, which also happened to be a public employees union. A portion of the funds CTA spent was received from NEA, but the bulk was generated from CTA assessments on California teachers.

In the smaller states, NEA’s political reach is perhaps best illustrated by the campaign against Measure 10 in South Dakota, a state not normally considered a union stronghold. The November 2008 initiative would have banned the use of tax money for campaigns or lobbying and restricted political contributions by government contractors.

NEA contributed $1.1 million to air TV ads against the measure. That amount of money goes a long way in a media market so small. NEA’s state affiliate, the South Dakota Education Association, has only 5,600 active members and could never have appropriated such a sum on its own. It would have required an additional assessment of almost $200 per member. Measure 10 was defeated, prompting its committee chairman to say, “We’ll be able to prepare accordingly next time knowing that the real opposition to ethics reform in South Dakota is NEA union officials back east.”

Legislative and campaign spending is far from the sum total of teacher union expenditures with a political aim. Both NEA and AFT send additional millions to a vast panoply of advocacy groups, coalitions, community organizations, and charities. Along with their statutory role as labor unions and stated role as professional organizations, NEA and AFT fill the role of philanthropic benefactors for a host of causes, most of them left-leaning (see sidebar).

A look at teachers union governance and financing will demonstrate how this philanthropic giving occurs. The school district’s payroll office deducts union dues from each teacher’s paycheck as a lump sum. The money is transmitted at regular intervals to the local union affiliate, which keeps its share and transmits the remainder to the state affiliate, which keeps its share and transmits the remainder to the national affiliate. NEA has an affiliate in every state and claims 14,000 locals. NEA received $162 from each member teacher this school year, and $93.50 from each full-time education support staff member. NEA’s budget for 2010 is $355.8 million.

AFT has a similar arrangement, although its power cannot be wielded as widely since most of its members reside in a single state, New York. AFT receives $190.70 in annual membership dues. The union’s 2010 budget is estimated at $165 million.

NEA spends its money in roughly equal thirds. One-third supports the physical plant and operating costs of the union’s D.C. and regional headquarters buildings. Another third pays the salaries and benefits of NEA’s staff of some 600 employees. The final third is returned to state affiliates in various forms, the largest being UniServ grants. This money helps pay for the labor negotiators and professional staffers employed by the state affiliates.

This third pot of cash also includes money for discretionary spending or, as it is categorized in the union’s financial disclosure report, “contributions, gifts and grants.” Ten dollars of each NEA member’s dues is set aside each year for the national union’s Media Fund and Ballot Initiative/Legislative Crises Fund. The Media Fund pays for national media campaigns and PR grants to state affiliates. The Crises Fund is the primary source of funding for whatever ballot measures or pending bills NEA state affiliates are supporting or opposing each year. Unspent money is carried over, leaving the national union with considerable sums to spend on campaigns in general election years.

The discretionary money is disbursed in a number of ways. The money can be distributed to the state affiliates, which then use it for ballot or legislative battles (see Figure 1, and its underlying data). The national union also makes direct contributions to campaigns or coalitions created around single issues. In the 2007-08 cycle, NEA gave some $17 million to ballot initiative groups in 12 states for a variety of measures related to constitutional conventions, property taxes, income taxes, labor laws, hotel taxes, redistricting, corporate taxes, and vehicle taxes.

More than any other single national entity, NEA is a driving force supporting attempts to raise state taxes, and defeating tax cut or limitation measures. The relative success of the national teachers unions in ballot initiative campaigns and legislative battles can greatly affect a state’s bottom line.

Spin Cycle

NEA and AFT apply their influence directly, through lobbying and election campaigns, but also indirectly via a network of friendly organizations made friendlier through substantial contributions. NEA’s “community outreach” efforts are particularly formidable, gaining the union allies in the fields of research, advocacy, and the media. Through the use of front groups, the teachers unions are able to disguise their role in funding these activities and thus their self-interest in a host of political issues.

The national teachers unions provide generous funding for research that supports their positions on education ($150,000 to FairTest) as well as budgetary issues ($650,000 to the Economic Policy Institute) and social policy ($165,000 to People For the American Way).

For example, NEA contributed $250,000 to the Arizona State University Office for Research and Sponsored Projects Administration. ASU’s Education Policy Research Unit is responsible for a series of highly critical studies of charter schools and vouchers. The unit also annually bestows its Bunkum Awards on think tanks that produce what the ASU panel considers to be the worst research of the year. The “honorees” are almost always conservative or libertarian organizations.

That particular project is “made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.” The Great Lakes Center also received $250,000 from NEA (out of a total income of $262,000), but its union entanglements don’t end there.

The press release announcing the center’s launch in September 2000 described it as “a nonprofit tax-exempt organization of education stakeholders with a common goal: the qualitative improvement and healthy growth of all public schools in the entire Great Lakes region. The organization represents a unique partnership between Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and other Great Lakes states.” There was no mention of teachers unions, even though the “unique partnership” wasn’t unique at all. It was exclusively a consortium of NEA state affiliates in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Sixteen of the center’s 17 officers and trustees are NEA national and state officers and employees. The 17th is Alex Molnar, who is, coincidentally enough, the director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

America Learns?

While the Great Lakes Center keeps its union ties quiet, at least the information is available to those who look for it. Communities for Quality Education (CQE) is entirely an NEA front group, although none of its material, nor any information on its web site, mentions the union at all.

CQE was created as “America Learns” on February 22, 2004, and two weeks later “notified” NEA of its existence and asked for “the largest possible contribution it can to help us launch America Learns and to encourage your affiliates and all members of the NEA family to give as generously as possible.”

Its mission was “spreading the word about the misguided so-called NCLB law, and how to fix it.” This, as it happens, was NEA’s primary focus at the time.

This ostensibly independent organization had a three-member board of directors: Anne Davis, at the time the president of the Illinois Education Association; Robert Bonazzi, executive director of the New Jersey Education Association; and Maurice Joseph, NEA’s deputy general counsel. The executive director was John Hein, who had been the associate executive director of government relations for the California Teachers Association.

By June, CQE had offices, staffers (including NEA employee Corina Cortez), and was airing ads against the No Child Left Behind Act in four battleground states. Many of the teachers featured in the ads were teachers union officers, though they were not identified as such. The cost of the ads: $2.9 million.

How did the fledgling organization come into such cash so quickly? As it turns out, CQE received donations from a number of NEA state affiliates, but the bulk of its funding came from the national NEA turning over its entire media campaign fund of $4 million to CQE. In addition, NEA sent $1.8 million in PAC money to CQE. All told, CQE received $8.9 million in 2004, and there’s no evidence that any of its funding came from anywhere except NEA and its affiliates.

CQE was active in the 2004 presidential election campaign, and the news coverage it received invariably failed to mention its union connections. It continued to receive millions from NEA in 2005 and 2006, mostly to advance the union’s agenda against the No Child Left Behind Act.

In 2007, CQE turned up in Utah, where a referendum was being held to overturn the state school voucher law. A CQE staffer helped organize an antivoucher rally and when asked by the Salt Lake Tribune who was paying his way, he replied, “a variety of sources.” CQE ultimately spent $336,000 on the Utah campaign.

With 2008 being another election year, NEA sent $1 million to CQE, though its activities rarely turned up in press coverage. The organization now seems to be on hiatus, last appearing in February 2009 in support of the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s “Save Pennsylvania’s Schools” campaign, and as the creator of Schoolhouse Talk, an Internet radio show.

The purpose of going to the trouble of creating groups like the Great Lakes Center and CQE is to give the appearance of widespread support for NEA’s education positions. The union’s use of proxies, or subcontractors, if you will, is not limited to that field. Through the generous disbursement of funds, NEA is able to secure the good offices of ideologically compatible groups involved in every domestic U.S. issue (see sidebar).

Are All Teachers Liberal?

Knowing what we do about how various groups line up politically, it probably does not come as a surprise to see a labor union contribute so heavily to progressive groups and causes. The problem is that it should come as a surprise.

NEA members lean no further to the left than any other large group of Americans. The national union conducts periodic internal surveys to ascertain member attitudes on a host of issues. These surveys are never made public, and results are tightly controlled, even within the organization. The 2005 NEA survey, consistent with previous results, found that members “are slightly more conservative (50%) than liberal (43%) in political philosophy.”

The 2009 Education Next-PEPG Survey of Public Opinion (see “The Persuadable Public,” features, Fall 2009) asked public school teachers about their views on education reforms their unions work tirelessly against, among them, charter schools and merit pay. The survey found that more than one-third (37 percent) of public school teachers somewhat or completely support the formation of charter schools, a figure that rose to 43 percent when respondents were told that President Obama supports charter schools. When told that the president supports merit pay, 31 percent of public school teachers express some or complete support for these policies as well.

The obvious question then is, how does a group with a politically diverse membership spend its money almost exclusively in support of liberal causes? And not just on those related to public education, but every conceivable issue?

It may be that the rank-and-file members don’t know anything about NEA’s expenditures. Thirty-six percent of respondents to the NEA survey admitted they were “not at all” involved with the union at any level. The organization has a vast and unending supply of funds from its rank-and-file membership. If members are largely ignorant of or apathetic to where that money is spent, it’s a paradise for a cadre of political activists.

The real solution to the mystery, though, is that NEA’s decisions are made by union leaders, most of whom identify themselves as liberal.

In concert with its member survey, NEA conducted a survey of its local affiliate presidents. The union asked the same political philosophy question of presidents, dividing the results by the size of the local (see Figure 2).

Even among the smallest locals, more of the presidents identify themselves as liberal than do members, and this becomes increasingly true as the size of the unions increases. Though we have no data on the subject, it is likely this trend continues through the hierarchy of the state and national affiliates. Indeed, about 80 percent of local union presidents at each level indicated that they thought NEA’s political philosophy was as liberal as or more liberal than their own. Local union presidents, at least, are aware of the strong liberal bias in the national union’s agenda.

Into the Light

The extent of teachers union influence over education policy is widely known. Education reformers have long recognized the clout of NEA and AFT when it comes to contentious issues like performance pay, charter schools, and testing. School administrators know of their power to affect education budget and personnel decisions. Politicians are aware of their unmatched ability to turn out volunteers for the dog work of campaigning—phone banks, precinct walks, and rallies. Reporters write about all of this.

Yet teachers unions as a massive general political force is an untold story. Rarely discussed is union influence over state and federal elections and over domestic policy, from fundamental issues such as taxation and health care to more esoteric ones, such as gay marriage and redistricting. It’s astonishing that a single organization can spend more than $56.3 million in an election cycle and still fly under the radar.

Part of the reason is that Americans are devoted to their public school teachers. An annual Harris poll routinely lists teachers among the professions Americans most trust (union leaders rank near the bottom). Because they represent people working with children, NEA and AFT benefit from residual good will in a way that the Teamsters and United Auto Workers do not. Press coverage of the teachers unions is usually assigned to an education reporter, which ensures the story will be framed around education issues. It’s only natural that agendas and motives related to the scope of collective bargaining, tax revenue streams, and internal union politics receive short shrift.

Coverage of teachers unions needs to emerge from its current position as an afterthought on the education beat, and assume its place alongside national fiscal and political reporting. Only then will the public see that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have a brother called Big Education.

Mike Antonucci is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency, which specializes in education labor issues.

We know that teacher unions are among the most powerful interest groups in state politics, and we know that they spend more money than almost any other organization.  In Florida the NEA and AFT spent $1,209,262 million dollars between 2007 and 2008. Did they promise Crist a fat share of that amount in exchange for his veto?

We can only guess, though we will know for sure when all the financial data become available long after election day.

Crist certainly did not veto the legislation because of public anger at the possibility of merit pay for teachers.  Education Next polling data from a representative sample in Florida showed the public more supportive than opposed and ready to be led by a popular leader.

If Crist becomes Florida’s next Senator, the teacher unions can claim that they are not only the most powerful interest group in Florida but strong enough to underpin a third-party movement.

So Crist’s calculations were based not on the political popularity of the issue, but on winning support from a fat cat with plenty of disposable cash.

At the NEA, Dennis Van Roekel moves up to the top rung of the officers’ ladder after serving two terms as vice president, succeeding Reg Weaver. Van Roekel, 61, is a former high-school math teacher who seems to revel in his anonymity. In his acceptance speech, he said a reporter had called him a “mystery man.”

“I want to tell you [who I am],” he told the NEA delegates. “The mission and vision of this organization absolutely defined who I am, what I care about, and what I believe in.”

Randi Weingarten, 50, who adds the national presidency of the AFT to her current responsibilities as head of the United Federation of Teachers, its New York affiliate, has had much more on-stage experience in the theatre of American politics. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, she declared, “Federal education policy must be about a lot more than testing…. When those children walk through the doors of our classrooms, they bring us their dreams, their potential and their trust. And sometimes they bring empty stomachs, untreated ailments, and life experiences that can chill you to your core.”

Besides her work with the teachers union, Weingarten has been chair of New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee, which coordinates negotiations for the city’s many public-service unions. As principal negotiator for three contentious contracts in New York, she faced down two mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg—neither one a pushover—and succeeded in winning a cumulative 43 percent raise for her teachers from 2002 to 2008. She was adept at maneuvers on the tricky three-way territory occupied by the union, the city, and the legislature upstate in Albany, which is often unsympathetic to the state’s southern metropolis.

Given the unions’ public profiles, you might not even realize that the AFT, at 1.4 million members the second-largest AFL-CIO affiliate, is less than half the size of the NEA, which signs in with 3.2 million (see Figure 1). But Weingarten’s team is quite effective at orchestrating publicity.

At the union’s own convention in Chicago, the centerpiece of Weingarten’s acceptance speech was the repudiation of the federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), once warmly welcomed by the AFT. Just before throwing it under the bus in her speech, Weingarten described it as “a bipartisan effort to close the gaps in educational achievement and complete the unfinished business of the 20th century.” She proposed to replace it with a sweeping vision of schools as “community schools,” providers of every service children and their families might need.

“Imagine,” she said, “schools that are open all day and offer after-school and evening recreational activities and homework assistance; high schools that allow students to sign up for morning, afternoon, or evening classes; that include child care and dental, medical, and counseling clinics or other services such as English language instruction, GED programs, or legal assistance.

“Imagine a federal law that…assures that every child learns to read by being exposed to a rich curriculum.

“Imagine if our schools had the educational resources we have long advocated, like quality pre-K, smaller classes, up-to-date materials and technology, and a nurturing atmosphere so no child feels anonymous.”

This is “Imagine” in the key of John Lennon—aspirational, rather than practical. Even though the incoming administration may be more sympathetic, and more beholden, to the teachers unions than the Bush administration (see Figure 2), there simply isn’t that kind of money floating around loose in the federal budget. Weingarten told the Chicago Tribune she couldn’t estimate how much such a plan would cost, or how many schools might be involved. But, she said, in cities where mayors have taken over the schools, the mayors could find the money.

It’s good that Weingarten is opening up the social welfare debate, says Andrew Rotherham, codirector of the think tank Education Sector. The issues are how to finance it, and how to ensure good results.

Even the briefest reflection reveals this proposal doesn’t seriously address those questions. Critics were quick to point out that schools already fall short of carrying out their principal responsibility, preparing young people who graduate from high school for citizenship and for higher education or productive work. Respected independent blogger Ken DeRosa wrote at D-Ed Reckoning, “This is what we’re supposed to be imagining—allowing a dysfunctional monopoly to take over responsibilities outside of its core function. That makes little sense.”

Selling Americans on the idea that responsibility for all the rest of the social services children need should fall on those same institutions is not realistic. Even the lesser aim of dispersing a broader variety of services to neighborhood schools that are convenient to families and often underused outside school hours—and sometimes during them, in cities where enrollments are falling faster than school boards can marshal the political capital to close almost-empty schools—is problematic. Dentistry, for instance, cannot be carried out by Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a child with a toothache on the other. A dental office is a high-tech, capital-intensive installation. Putting one in every elementary school in a large district, where most of them would be empty a lot of the time, makes no economic or professional sense.

Other problems would emerge given any serious attempt to implement such a program, especially if it were nationwide and in response to a federal mandate (or in pursuit of federal dollars, which never seem to quite cover the new responsibilities districts take on to get them). Intense lobbying would shape the law, probably for the worse. And even if a new law were a pretty good one, as laws establishing massive new federal entitlements go, it would run up against the inconvenient truth that social-service interventions, whatever their other benefits, have limited academic payoffs.

Apart from Weingarten’s unrealistic proposal, both introductory speeches amount to announcements that the new union presidents intend to do pretty much what their predecessors were doing. Both of them proclaim that without their unions there is no salvation for American education. Van Roekel told NEA delegates that as a teacher, “You soon learn that being a teacher was half the job. The other half was being part of this organization.” For those who care about the students they teach, or who want to make a difference in their lives, “education and the association work are hand in hand, one and the same.”

Convention speeches invite hyperbole, that’s understood—but such sentiments are insulting to teachers who believe education is their whole job, not just half of it, and who are not motivated by a desire for power, as Van Roekel admits he is. “The first time I got to be grievance chair and sat across the table from the superintendent and all those people, and I thought, man, this little math teacher is really tying up a lot of salaries on the other side of the table. And they had to listen to me.”

He adds, “I loved the feeling of the power of the collective voice, of the collective action…. Nothing good in this country has ever come except through collective action.”

Perhaps you have to crave power to persevere to the top of the NEA’s bureaucratic structure. According to the organization’s web site, before being elected NEA vice president, Van Roekel spent almost 20 years as national secretary-treasurer, a member of the national executive committee, and an officer at the local and state level in Arizona.

Weingarten is no less committed to the primacy of her union, a commitment she credits to her mother, who as an AFT member and a teacher in Nyack, New York, participated in a seven-week strike even at the cost of “material sacrifice for our family.”

“The people who do the work,” she said, “care more than anyone else, know more than anyone else, and can do more than anyone else about improving the public services that Americans count on.”

A lawyer by training, she became legal counsel to then United Federation president Sandra Feldman in 1986, was elected assistant secretary to the local union in 1995, treasurer two years later, and president in 1998 when Feldman moved on to the national presidency.

The AFT takes an expansive view of which public-service workers it can represent. Weingarten noted organizing victories for Colorado state employees (along with other unions), nurses at a medical center in New Jersey, part-time adjunct faculty at a community college, 21,000 paraprofessionals and school-related personnel in Oregon, and 28,000 home-based child-care providers in New York City—“the biggest union organizing campaign the city had seen in half a century.”

In contrast, delegates at the NEA convention voted down the leadership’s recommendation to allow private school employees to join the union, although they did approve membership for workers in private preschools.

AFT may have more reason than the NEA to search far afield for new categories of employees to recruit. Mike Antonucci, whose Education Intelligence Agency bird-dogs union doings, wrote in June that almost a third of the nation’s largest school districts, the 82 with enrollment of 50,000 or more, had fewer students in 2006 than in 2001. AFT represented many districts with declining enrollments, including Weingarten’s own local in New York, down 4.9 percent. The biggest enrollment drop was in Cleveland, which fell a remarkable 22.3 percent (see Figure 3). Antonucci said he found only one large AFT district that was growing, Broward County, Florida. On the NEA side, several districts are enjoying double-digit growth, and only three—San Diego, Milwaukee, and Columbus, Ohio—are declining.

Part of the enrollment decline results from students choosing charter schools, and the AFT is trying to cover the charter school bases. The Economist noted that the AFT has successfully organized more than 70 charter schools, in 10 states. Weingarten’s New York local supports three charter schools itself, one opened just this fall.

Organizing schools one by one, though, or even a few at a time, is a tough way for a union to grow. Many charters are established by former public school teachers who left those jobs in part because they chafed under certain aspects of union contracts. And the prospects for laws compelling charter unionization, state by state, let alone federally, are not promising.

The organizations differ, but not by much, on No Child Left Behind. According to Education Week, the NEA released a list of its priorities for improving the law, including support for the teaching profession, sustained federal funding for mandates, and promotion of innovation and best practices. The union’s newest manifesto, released just before the convention, is an anti-NCLB screed titled “Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020: Achieving A New Balance in the Federal Role to Transform America’s Public Schools.” It calls for an expanded federal role in education, which somehow or other still respects the primary role of states, districts, and schools. That is, we need more money but we don’t want you telling us how to spend it.

Weingarten said simply, “NCLB has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had. Conceived by accountants, drafted by lawyers, and distorted by ideologues, it is too badly broken to be fixed.”

The AFT claims to be in favor of accountability, but only if accountability takes into account “the conditions that are beyond the teacher’s or the school’s control” and the federal government provides the necessary resources. Those were excuses for failure before No Child Left Behind, and they will be again.

Van Roekel said his union remains opposed to basing teacher pay on test scores. Once again, Weingarten demonstrates the greater political skill. On the one side, she agreed with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to a test plan offering monetary incentives to teachers in schools whose poorest students make significant gains in achievement (see “New York City’s Education Battles,” features, Spring 2008). But then she persuaded the New York state legislature to block Bloomberg’s push to make student performance one of the criteria for awarding teacher tenure.

The mayor condemned the legislature’s response: “There’s a policy change to prevent school boards from judging teachers on whether or not they teach, and whether or not their kids learn,” he told the New York Daily News. “I happen to think that is just an outrage and it’s unconscionable.”

Teachers should be accountable just as other employees are, Bloomberg said. “All of us are judged on whether or not we do a good job, and to not judge teachers the same ways, it’s an insult to the teachers.”

The New York Times weighed in as well: “It is an absurd ban that does a disservice to the state’s millions of public school students.”

Weingarten justified the change by claiming, “There is no independent or conclusive research that shows you can accurately measure the impact of an individual teacher on a student’s academic achievement.”

That’s the kind of flat-out indefensible pronouncement that only a union official would risk making. Years of experience with value-added assessments such as the one pioneered by William Sanders in Tennessee have provided plenty of evidence that most individual teachers can be reliably compared on how effective they are at raising academic performance. But acknowledging any such obvious fact would sweep the support from under the fixed salary ladders that are the basis for teacher contracts in most districts.

So is there any prospect for reform in the near term? On the NEA side, almost certainly not.

“I am not coming in with a whole new list of things to do,” Van Roekel told Education Week in an interview during the convention. “I don’t think it’s about me; it’s about the organization. I am going to do all I can during my time to move the mission of this organization along.”

As for the AFT, Weingarten, always the more adept, called for “a bold new vision” to strengthen neighborhood schools. But so far, she hasn’t said what it might be, other than suggesting that school personnel take on the roles of social worker and distributors of medical services.

Linda Seebach retired in 2007 as an editorial writer and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where she frequently wrote about education.

The ongoing global financial crisis is forcing many employers, from General Motors to local general stores, to take a hard look at the costs of the compensation packages they offer employees. For public school systems, this will entail a consideration of fringe benefit costs, which in recent years have become an increasingly important component of teacher compensation. During the 2005–06 school year, the most recent year for which U.S. Department of Education data are available, the nation’s public schools spent $187 billion in salaries and $59 billion in benefits for instructional personnel. Total benefits added about 32 percent to salaries, up from 25 percent in 1999–2000. The increase reflects the well-known rise in health insurance costs, but it also appears to include growing costs of retirement benefits, which have received much less attention.

Conventional wisdom holds that teacher pensions (along with other public pensions) are more costly than private retirement benefits, for reasons dating to an earlier era of low teacher salaries over lifelong careers. In spite of dissent from this view by some researchers (see sidebar), in this case we find that conventional wisdom is right: the cost of retirement benefits for teachers is higher than for private-sector professionals.

To track changes in retirement costs and compare employer contributions to retirement for public school teachers with those for private-sector professionals, we draw on recent data from a major employer survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor. These data show that the rate of employer contributions to retirement benefits for public school teachers in 2008 is substantially higher than for private professionals: 14.6 percent of earnings for teachers vs. 10.4 percent for private professionals. Moreover, the gap has widened over the four years the data have been available. Between March 2004 and September 2008, the difference more than doubled, rising from 1.9 to 4.2 percentage points (see Figure 1).

There are several reasons one might expect employer contributions to retirement to be higher for teachers. First, nearly all teachers are covered by traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans, in which employees receive a regular retirement check based on a legislatively determined formula. These plans have, over the years, come to offer retirement at relatively young ages, at a rate that replaces a substantial portion of final salary. U.S. Department of Education data show a median retirement age for public school teachers of 58 years, compared to about 62 for the labor force as a whole. A teacher in her mid-50s who has worked for 30 years under a typical teacher pension plan will be entitled to an annuity at retirement of between 60 and 75 percent of her final salary. In nearly all plans this annuity has some sort of cost-of-living adjustment. One does not generally observe comparable retirement plans for professionals and lower-tier managers in the private sector, since most employers have replaced traditional DB plans with defined contribution (DC) or similar 401(k)-type plans, in which the employer and employee contribute to a retirement account that belongs to the employee. Nor do those traditional DB plans that remain typically reward retirement at such early ages; they more nearly resemble Social Security, where eligibility is age 62 for early retirement, and 66 and rising for normal retirement.

The Survey Data

Our analysis draws on data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS), an employer survey developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The NCS survey is designed to measure employer costs for wages and salaries and fringe benefits across a wide range of occupations and industries in the public and private sectors. Although the BLS has been reporting quarterly fringe-benefit cost data for various public and private employee groups for more than a decade, only since March 2004 has the bureau broken out these fringe-benefit cost data for public school K–12 teachers. In this article we use those data to compare retirement benefit costs for public K–12 teachers with costs for private-sector professionals. We use the most detailed available private-sector comparison group, “management, professional, and related,” a category that includes business and financial managers, operations specialists, accountants and auditors, computer programmers and analysts, engineers, lawyers, physicians, and nurses.

We measure the cost of retirement benefits as a percentage of earnings. Virtually all states specify in law that the employer will contribute a certain percentage of teacher salaries to a DB pension fund (employee contributions are similarly specified), and it is commonplace to compare such contribution rates among the states. Similarly, private-sector employers offering DC plans will typically specify their contribution as a percentage of salary (often as a match to employee contributions). Unlike some other benefits (e.g., health insurance), if salaries change, the dollar costs for retirement benefits move proportionally. On the benefit side, the DB formula ties one’s starting annuity to final average salary, while the adequacy of a DC plan is commonly thought of in terms of the salary replacement rate. Thus it is natural to specify retirement costs as a percentage of salary, both for teachers and for private-sector professionals.

In making this comparison, we must account for the fact that, while all of the private-sector professionals are covered by Social Security, a number of public school teachers are not. Some of the higher cost of employer retirement plans for teachers is offset by lower employer contributions for Social Security benefits. Thus, we should compare the contribution rates for employer-provided retirement benefits and Social Security for both groups of workers. While the BLS reports the Social Security contribution rate for private professionals, it does not report a similar rate for teachers. However, we are able to make such an adjustment by multiplying the share of teachers covered by Social Security, which the BLS estimates to be 73 percent, times the employer contribution rate (6.2 percent). This assumes that the vast majority of teachers are below the Social Security earnings cap (currently $102,000) and that the share of teachers in Social Security has been steady over the four years for which we make the comparison.

A time series with quarterly data for these benefit percentages is reported in Figure 1. Two patterns are visible. First, the contribution rate is considerably higher for public school teachers than for private professionals. In the most recent quarter for which data are reported, ending September 2008, the employer contribution rate for public K–12 teachers (14.6 percent) was 4.2 points higher than that for private-sector professionals (10.4 percent). Second, the gap is widening. While the private sector contribution rate has been relatively flat over the four years, the rate for public school teachers has markedly increased, doubling the gap between them from one-fifth to two-fifths.

In one important respect, it is likely that the BLS data underestimate the cost of retirement benefits for public school teachers. Many public school districts (and some states) provide health insurance benefits for retired public school teachers. In the course of this research we were surprised to learn that retiree health insurance benefits are not included in the BLS employment cost estimates. Since private employers have largely eliminated this benefit, this means that our estimate of the gap in retirement benefits favoring public school teachers is low, although we cannot be sure of the extent of the underestimate.

Social Security and Teachers

While the overall employer contribution rate for public school teachers is higher than for private-sector professionals, the group average may mask differences between teachers who are and are not covered by Social Security. In order to assess this point empirically, we examined directly the data on employer contributions for teacher pension funds. We find that total employer contributions for both groups of public school teachers are higher than for private-sector professionals.

Most teachers are in statewide pension funds, with a relatively small number in district funds (e.g., New York City, Denver, St. Louis). Data on employer contributions for these plans are available in annual financial reports for each fund, which are surveyed by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA).

Using data on contributions from NASRA and pension fund annual reports where necessary, and using weights based on the number of teachers employed in each state or district as reported in the NCES Common Core of Data, it is possible to compute average employer contribution rates for teachers. First we consider teachers who are in states and districts covered by Social Security. For these teachers, we calculate the weighted average employer contribution to be 9 percent of earnings. This can be compared to the estimate of employer contributions to retirement for private-sector professionals and managers, calculated from the BLS data as 4.7 percent for the comparable period (FY07). This is a 4.3 percent difference favoring public school teachers, almost double, in those states and districts where teachers are enrolled in Social Security, so the comparison is on an equal footing.

For states and districts where teachers are not in Social Security, we calculate the average employer contribution at 11.1 percent of earnings. Of course, this is considerably higher than the 4.7 percent retirement contributions for private-sector professionals, but, perhaps surprisingly, it even exceeds their employers’ combined contributions to retirement and Social Security, which averaged 10.3 percent for FY07. Thus, as Figure 2 shows, comparing teachers with professionals in private-sector employment, total employer contributions are higher for teachers whether or not they are also covered by Social Security.

Our analysis of evidence from the BLS National Compensation Survey and the NASRA Public Fund Survey shows that the employer contribution rates for public school teachers are a larger percentage of earnings than for private-sector professionals and managers, whether or not we take account of teacher coverage under Social Security. In addition, the BLS data show that the contribution rate for teachers is clearly trending upward.

Looking Ahead

What are the likely trends going forward for the cost of teacher retirement benefits? No one knows for sure, but we can identify the two key factors that will drive these costs: future developments in the benefits themselves and in their funding. The trend through much of the postwar period was to enhance the retirement formulas in various ways, including reducing the age or service requirement for full benefits. For example, just last year New York City agreed to enhance its pension formula for younger teachers. But there is evidence that benefit enhancement has generally abated in recent years. There are even a few states, including Texas, that have moved to reduce benefits for newly hired teachers. However, this is unlikely to reduce costs in the near future, since benefits for incumbent teachers are protected by law in most states.

The other factor to consider is the funding status of teacher pension plans. The vast majority of teacher pension plans are not fully funded. This means that contributions include both the “normal cost” of pension liabilities accruing to current employees and the legacy costs of amortizing unfunded liabilities accrued previously (due to a variety of reasons, including the original pay-as-you go nature of most plans, as well as unfunded benefit enhancements over the years). In theory, if the actuarial assumptions hold true going forward and no new benefits are enacted, the amortization costs will eventually disappear (after 30 years, under a typical funding schedule), in much the same way that a homeowner’s monthly expenses decline when the mortgage gets paid off.

However, the near-term prospects may be very different. For one thing, public pension funds face the possibility of important accounting changes. Unlike private pension funds, public fund actuaries have been allowed to discount future liabilities at a rate of about 8 percent, the assumed long-run market return on fund assets. Finance economists have argued that such a high discount rate is imprudent, however, and there have been signs that public accounting standards might move toward the private-sector rules, based on corporate bond and Treasury rates, which could reduce the discount rate to about 5 percent. This would dramatically raise the required amortization payments.

Finally, it bears noting that the market value of pension funds has fallen precipitously as of this writing (December 2008). Barring a major market recovery, pension funds across the country will have new, large unfunded liabilities. Under actuarial smoothing methods, these losses will be phased in, raising required amortization payments over the next few years. If the accounting rules for public funds also change, reducing the discount rate on liabilities, the employers of public school teachers, along with other public employers, will face a double hit, requiring sharp increases in contributions. By contrast, those private employers who have switched over to defined contribution plans in recent decades will be unaffected. In short, there are good reasons to believe that the contribution gap we have documented will continue to widen in coming years.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

The Education Equality Project champions accountability, pay reform, and school choice, while the Broader, Bolder coalition insists we must attend to health care, preschool, and parenting skills if students are to succeed in school. The Obama administration must negotiate this split in pursuing education reform; indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only individual to serve as a founding member of both groups.

In this forum, president of Democrats for Education Reform Joe Williams speaks for the Education Equality Project and Pedro Noguera offers the Broader, Bolder perspective on improving K–12 schooling, the early record of the Obama administration, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Education Next: What principles unify the signers of the coalition [Education Equality Project or A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education]? Can you explain the key reforms the coalition is calling for?

Pedro Noguera: The basic principle underlying the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform is that efforts to raise student achievement cannot ignore the unmet social needs of children, particularly those related to concentrated poverty—inadequate health, housing, and nutrition. These conditions have a tremendous impact upon child development and learning.

Poverty does not cause academic failure, but it is a factor that profoundly influences the character of schools and student performance, in at least three broad and interrelated ways: 1) in most cases, considerably less money is spent on the education of poor children. Per-pupil spending has bearing on the quality of facilities, the availability of learning materials, and the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. While high levels of funding do not guarantee that children will receive a quality education, money matters, and many of the most acclaimed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools, even though they generally serve fewer high-need students (i.e., special education or English language learners); 2) the unmet, nonacademic needs of children (social, emotional, and psychological) often have an impact on learning; 3) schools serving large numbers of poor children typically lack the resources and expertise to respond to their academic and social needs.

This does not mean that poor children cannot learn or that until we eliminate poverty and related social issues we will not be able to educate all children in this country. There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. However, the fact that a small number of schools have experienced a degree of success does not mean that we can simply blame other schools for their failures or ignore what is happening to children outside of school. Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities.

BBA advocates providing universal access to health care for children, quality early-childhood education, and expanded access to extended learning opportunities, after school and during the summer. While these measures alone will not guarantee higher student achievement or large-scale school improvement, they are essential for creating a context in which other education reforms can be effective.

Joe Williams: The Education Equality Project is a coalition of leaders (from education, civil rights, government, public policy, and business) who believe that what happens inside schools (and in the politics surrounding schooling) plays a tremendous role in shaping the achievement gap that exists in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The focus for reform, therefore, should be on what happens between teachers and students. That isn’t meant to be glib; we keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

One of the beliefs that has tied together the signatories of EEP thus far is a commitment to eliminating the racial and ethnic achievement gap in this country. This is not just an education issue, but a civil rights issue. If we neglect the education needs of our children, we are depriving them of the kinds of opportunities that the American dream can offer.

The EEP has called for an effective teacher for every child (paying teachers as professionals, giving them the tools and training to do their work effectively, and making tough decisions about ineffective teachers); empowering parents by allowing them to choose the best schools for their children; holding grown-ups at all levels accountable for the education of our children; and, very important, having enough strength in our convictions to stand up to anyone who seeks to preserve a failed system.

EN: Is it fair to expect all students to meet a uniform performance baseline? Is it reasonable to hold schools and educators responsible for ensuring that students meet that bar?

JW: Yes, these expectations are fair and reasonable. The key is making sure that schools and educators have the tools to provide students with the kind of education they need to clear the bar, including resources, the ability to build teams of excellent educators, and enough flexibility at the school level to adjust the length of the school day and year (among other things). This will likely require both additional resources and smarter use of education budgets around the country. Newark mayor Cory Booker often talks about the fact that we allow time spent on education to be the constant, while achievement is the variable. We need the flexibility to flip that notion so that time is the variable and achievement is the constant.

PN: Setting high academic standards for schools and students to meet is important but relatively easy to do. The harder and more important task is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. This is what government policy must strive to achieve. We have quality standards for airports, highways, food, drugs, and water, but no state has adopted standards for learning environments, and many poor children attend under-resourced, inferior schools.

In fact, the most troubled schools typically serve students with the greatest needs. These schools cannot solve problems related to inequality and poverty without additional support. Yet this is essentially what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and most education reforms that preceded it have expected. Almost eight years after the enactment of NCLB, high dropout rates and low achievement are still pervasive throughout this country, particularly in schools where poor children are concentrated.

EN: Do you think the administration’s actions thus far on school choice and charter schooling have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

PN: School choice is an idea that should be supported in principle. It is good for parents to have a variety of schools from which to choose because not all children have the same needs or interests. The greater challenge is ensuring that there are many high-quality schools to choose from and ensuring that choice does not contribute to further segregation in schools. Unfortunately, in many communities that have enacted choice plans, well-organized and informed parents do their best to gain access to the better schools, and invariably, others are left out. Racial segregation in schools has increased in the last 20 years, and poor children have become concentrated in the worst schools. Furthermore, in most choice systems it’s not parents but schools that really do the choosing. The better schools are often able to screen out needy students and limit enrollment. Because of high demand, they can be selective about whom they choose. This often occurs even in charter schools that use lotteries to determine admission but set criteria that are difficult for low-income parents to meet. Those who are not chosen by the superior schools invariably end up in lower-quality public schools with fewer resources.

Many, but not all, charter schools have demonstrated considerable success in educating poor children. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed his support for charter schools, even though in several states, such as Texas and Arizona, the charter schools are often no better, and in some cases are worse, than the public schools. As a trustee of the State University of New York, I am proud to say that the charter schools we authorize consistently outperform similar schools in the communities where they are located. If such quality-control measures can be adopted in other communities, charter schools should be supported as a means to increase the supply of good schools available to poor children.

JW: Choice, in and of itself, won’t bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. But it is difficult to imagine how we can drive that systemic change without choice playing a role. The administration’s actions to limit the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship (K–12 vouchers), for example, were perplexing, if only because the actions were accompanied by empty rhetoric about doing what is best for children. How do we look at low-income families with a straight face and tell them they can’t send their children to better schools because it isn’t the right policy to pursue for the broader system? We need to be doing everything we can to reform the larger system, but by all means, let’s help those families who need good schools now. All of that said, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have provided tremendous cover for the public charter-school movement and have helped shift the focus toward identifying those schools that are doing an outstanding job of educating students and giving them the green light to bring their models to scale.

I have never believed that a voucher or a charter can teach a child to read or do math at exceptionally high levels. That stuff happens in great schools, and vouchers and charter school lotteries offer access to those schools for families who can’t afford to live in affluent neighborhoods or send their children to effective private schools. The key is ensuring that they have an abundance of great schools from which to choose. The public charter-school movement, in addressing both the supply and demand sides of this equation, has emerged as the most promising development in the broader attempt to save public education. The question is whether the charter movement will provide the political spark needed to fundamentally transform our public schools.

EN: Is basing pay on teacher performance essential to school improvement? Is it possible to craft a merit-pay plan that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will endorse? Are teachers unions and existing collective-bargaining agreements an impediment to school quality?

JW: I think we have gotten way too far ahead in this discussion. We are talking about merit pay and performance pay in school systems that recognize neither merit nor performance. Teachers unions are understandably squeamish about this topic because today’s testing regimens were not created to serve this purpose. Until people feel confident in the tests that we are using, it will be difficult to build compensation systems on them.

This is an issue we can’t afford to ignore, however. The unions set out to create a standard of fairness for all teachers. The end result, in many cases, is a system that doesn’t allow itself to view great teachers any differently than it does mediocre teachers. Evaluations rate teachers as merely “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As long as excellence is irrelevant in our schools, we will continue to be stuck in this holding pattern. Wouldn’t it be something if we could strive for systems filled with “excellent” teachers, where excellence actually means something? We’re going to need a lot of help from the NEA and AFT in getting there, since they are holding the keys right now.

PN: Addressing the effectiveness of teachers must be an essential part of education reform in this country. However, judging teachers and awarding bonuses simply on the basis of test scores is problematic. We have already witnessed a large number of schools that have adopted scripted curricula and a narrow focus on test preparation as one way to raise test scores. This tendency will undoubtedly increase if teachers are evaluated exclusively on that basis. Such an approach is likely to discourage good teachers from working in high-need schools and to widen the gap between poor and affluent students. A narrow focus on raising test scores is also likely to deny poor students access to an enriched curriculum that encourages the development of higher-order thinking skills.

It makes more sense to devise incentives, including increased pay, to attract teachers with a track record of effectiveness, to high-need schools and classrooms. Such teachers can be identified through systematic evaluations carried out by principals and peers. If we could combine such a strategy with lower class sizes and extended learning opportunities after school, we could see major gains for struggling students.

In many cities, unions have resisted giving districts greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned, and in too many cases they have made it difficult to remove teachers who are ineffective and inept. Since it seems likely that teachers unions will be around for many years to come, it would be wise to find ways to collaborate with them to devise peer review programs like those that have shown promise in districts such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. In these districts, ineffective teachers are removed in greater numbers than in districts that rely on principal evaluation. Districts should also be encouraged to use the negotiation process to push for greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned to schools.

EN: The president has touted the $5 billion for preschool in the stimulus bill. How can we be confident that the money will fund difference-making programs?

PN: Most of the nations that outperform the United States in educational outcomes provide universal access to quality preschool. Research in child development has shown that the learning that occurs during infancy establishes a foundation for learning throughout life. It is cost effective and in our national interest to expand access to quality early-childhood education for all children.

We know two important things about early childhood education: 1) children who have access to quality programs generally outperform children who do not, and 2) the benefits of quality preschool can be further enhanced if quality of education is maintained in the K–12 system. The situation is similar for elementary schools. Throughout the country we have seen a growing number of successful primary schools and increases in test scores. However, these gains often are not sustained in middle school. This should not be used as a justification to question the value of elementary school nor should similar logic be used to limit expansion of early childhood education.

JW: If high-quality pre-K isn’t such a good idea, why are rich people in my neighborhood running around thinking that the Earth will implode (and their kid won’t get into Harvard someday) if they don’t get a slot in the most sought-after preschool programs? Providing access to high-quality preschool opportunities to the have-nots is an important part of the overall reform effort, as long as those programs successfully help students prepare for the world that awaits them in kindergarten and beyond.

Critics note that finding “high-quality” early-childhood programs, just like finding high-quality K–12 schools, is where the proposition gets iffy. My organization, Democrats for Education Reform, has been pushing to extend state charter-school laws so that charter schools can offer pre-K while being held accountable for their results. Connecting pre-K to early childhood programs that run through 3rd grade would close the gap that exists between what is taught in pre-K and what students need to be able to do in the later grades.

This is about making sure that all students are starting off on as close to a level playing field as possible, whether or not they can afford to make a $100,000 contribution to get a leg up on preschool enrollment.

EN: The Broader, Bolder Approach has made the case that school reform must attend to the “physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills” of students. Should schools and educators be tasked with this? At what point can or should we start to hold educators responsible for student outcomes?

JW: Students clearly have needs that extend beyond merely learning to read and do math. In the most successful schools serving low-income students, we see a wide range of child development activities, including sports, dance, art, chess, and citizenship enrichment activities. The notion that these activities are distractions from academic instruction assumes this is an either/or proposition. The best schools out there today seem to nail both.

This is where issues like better use of time come into play. Many educators decided long ago (seemingly correctly) that it is not possible to meet the complex needs of their students with a school day that ends at 3 p.m. This is particularly true for students who are two and three years behind where they are supposed to be academically.

PN: It is impossible and undesirable to separate academic performance from physical health, character development, and a variety of nonacademic skills. Sick and unhealthy children generally don’t do as well in school as healthy ones, and children who have trouble getting along with others typically don’t do very well either. From their very beginning, public schools have been charged with preparing children for work and citizenship, and such preparation has never focused solely upon academic skills.

To educate the “whole child,” schools must provide students with an enriched education that includes art, music, physical education, and character development in addition to the core subjects. The fact that skills in these areas cannot be easily assessed should not trouble us since most middle-class and affluent children receive such an education already and typically no one asks for evidence that such an approach has an impact on their test scores.

The highest-performing schools never focus exclusively on student achievement. In fact, what typically distinguishes the best schools from the others is the culture—shared expectations, values, norms, and beliefs—that permeate the school environment.

EN: The president has suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the $5 billion in “innovation” education funds, provides an opportunity to “transform” schooling. What are a couple of developments that give you cause for optimism or pessimism? How will we know in a few years if these education funds were spent wisely?

PN: While many public schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of reform, I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity about why past reforms have failed and insufficient understanding about the direction change must take if we are to obtain better results. Why do we still have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher in several cities eight years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and why are so many schools still foundering after substantial investments of public and private funds on reform? Several studies have shown that reforms have failed because we have ignored the nonacademic needs of children, because we have ignored school culture, because we have not evaluated reforms and insisted upon accountability, and because we have been too quick to pursue fads and gimmicks (small schools, technology, testing) while ignoring more substantive issues that support teaching and learning.

More funding is needed in many districts to address the lack of resources, but given the recession, we will need to rely upon better coordination between schools, nonprofits, and local government to respond to student needs. And money alone will not solve the problems facing America’s schools. We need a new vision and a new approach. A Broader, Bolder Approach offers part of the way forward. This must be combined with strategies that improve the quality of teaching and increase the accountability and responsiveness of schools to the communities they serve.

JW: The president and Secretary Duncan seem to have figured out that the leverage that comes from insisting that $5 billion be attached to innovation is tremendous. Even before a single dime was disbursed from the “Race to the Top” fund, we saw state legislatures take actions to support things like charter school expansion: Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Rhode Island were not exactly lining up to help charter schools until Duncan made clear that it would impact these states’ applications for federal funding. For a state like Tennessee, which risked losing $100 million in Duncan’s discretionary spending, the conversation quickly changed. A charter-school expansion bill that had been declared dead and tagged by the political coroners came back to life before our very eyes.

The challenge will come when it is time to convert the leverage Duncan has discovered into ongoing federal appropriations. This will launch a dramatic transformation of the role of the federal government in education. This is where we should be optimistic.

Politically, Duncan and Obama are going to need to tell good stories about what has been unleashed here through the stimulus package. If successful school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First can get help (financially and legislatively) in bringing their models to scale, and if successful education programs can be brought to more and more students, there will be a compelling story to tell. Public education will be on its way to saving itself.

EN: What does BBA’s proposed accountability system look like? How does it differ from NCLB?

PN: The BBA proposal for accountability emphasizes qualitative and quantitative evaluations of schools. That is, rather than relying exclusively on test scores to judge schools, BBA calls for the creation of an inspectorate, similar to that used in other countries with high-performing education systems, that is comprised of experienced educators, policymakers and scholars, to evaluate schools and make recommendations about how they might be improved. Such an approach could be used to provide schools with detailed feedback on how to make better use of resources and employ strategies that will enable them to become more successful in raising achievement and overcoming obstacles to learning.

Under NCLB, schools are judged largely on the basis of test scores, and many schools have figured out that the system can be gamed simply by targeting groups of students with intensive test preparation. Schools that are faced with greater challenges are simply labeled “failing” and targeted with threats and humiliation. The underlying assumption is that the educators are lazy and that pressure can be used to force them to improve. Accountability is essential if we are going to bring about school improvement on a larger scale, but it must be accompanied by real assistance and support.

In some cases, shutting down failing schools, as Secretary Duncan has suggested, may be necessary, but we must acknowledge ahead of time that the number of failing schools is simply too great for this to be the only strategy that we use. It is more constructive and effective to find out why a school has failed and to work with educators and local stakeholders to address the causes.

EN: In the context of EEP’s proposed reforms, how will an expanded federal role make a significant difference? How should new federal funds be distributed?

JW: An expanded federal role will allow our entire nation to cut through some of the political fog that has prevented good, sound ideas about how to change our schools from getting the go-ahead to proceed as part of a major systemic reform strategy. This is about using the tremendous leverage of the federal government to force some really blunt conversations at the state and district level, the kinds of conversations that make people uncomfortable and often lead to political paralysis. We have this tendency, if policy conversations make people feel uncomfortable, to sweep important issues under the rug. This is one of the reasons so little has actually changed despite waves and waves of reforms. We have an opportunity to change that dynamic, but only if President Obama holds firm on his commitment to bring change to public education.

Michelle Rhee’s senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers’ lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn’t run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.

But then, Rhee wades in with, “Here’s what I think,” or “What I don’t want,” or “This is crap,” or “I want someone to figure this out,” or “I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do; we can talk about how we’re gonna do it.” And that is that. Next order of business, please.

Rhee’s style—as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway—has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn’t kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers’ credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.

When I asked Rhee to name her most significant achievement in her two years in Washington, her answer suggested that any progress is, so far, only incremental. “We have begun—begun—begun—to establish a culture of accountability,” she said, with a long pause between each “begun.” A teacher had recently e-mailed her about a personnel matter, she went on, and was thrilled that Rhee had replied. “It’s sorta sad because the expectations are so low. The fact that you just get a response is celebrated,” she said.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers that they should judge her on “student performance.” Are test scores rising? Are students graduating? So far, there’s some evidence that they are, although some teachers and parents say that even that evidence is suspect.

But not much learning gets done without institutional support, and for decades in Washington, not much has. When I asked Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University’s urban-education policy program, on what measures Rhee should be judged, he answered with a long list. It included how well the schools work with other city agencies (to get sidewalks plowed in the winter, for example), how many and which colleges new teachers come from (the wider the net, the better), how quickly managers return phone calls, and whether teacher absenteeism is down. Only at the end of the list did he get to student performance. “The other stuff are the necessary conditions to get to student achievement,” he said.

That’s not particularly glamorous for a national media darling who has been celebrated on magazine covers, on Capitol Hill, and by the president, but it is a start.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers to judge her on “student performance.”

Rock Bottom?

It’s not news that Washington’s schools are among the most woeful in the country, but even a cynic has to gasp. The mismanagement is legendary: consider the 5 million personnel records Rhee says she found piled on a storeroom floor when she took office. Marc Borbely, a former teacher, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004 to find out how many work orders were outstanding at the central maintenance office. The answer: 25,000.

Teachers complained of out-of-control students: The city’s Ballou High School was closed for a 35-day cleanup after students stole chemistry-lab thermometers and scattered the mercury around hallways. In most school districts, mercury thermometers had been replaced years earlier.

The system churned through six superintendents in 10 years, usually after brutal head butting with the city council and community activists. That made Washington the La Brea Tar Pits of strategic plans: Each one sank into oblivion as its drafters moved on. The school funding formula changed four times under as many superintendents.

Academic measures were miserable. The 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered before Rhee’s arrival but announced five months after her term began, found that 61 percent of the city’s 4th graders had below-basic reading skills, which means they could barely read. Just 8 percent of its 8th graders were proficient—that is, at grade level—or above in math.

Scores on the district’s own tests for the 2006–07 school year, the last before Rhee’s arrival, were higher but still dismal. Just 38 percent of elementary-school children were at grade level or above in reading, and 27 percent of high schoolers were at grade level or above in math. Districtwide, fewer than 30 percent of African American students were reading at grade level, compared to 87 percent of whites, a 57-percentage-point gap.

Rhee arrived to find that all 10 of Washington’s comprehensive high schools had failed to meet federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) adequate yearly progress goals and that 48 of its 67 elementary schools were in some level of NCLB-mandated corrective action. The high-school dropout rate hovered at about 50 percent, and just 9 percent of entering 9th graders ever graduated from college.

On the SAT—a test presumably only the most ambitious students take—43 percent of district students who took the exam in 2009 scored 390 or below on the 800-point math test, which awards 200 points just for showing up. African Americans citywide averaged 773 on the 1600-point reading and math tests combined, or about 400 points less than they’d need for admission to the nearby University of Maryland.

Community pressure to “do something” about the schools’ performance had never materialized, though. Political leaders had seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where African Americans account for a majority of the population, the voter rolls, the city council, local-government posts, and union leadership. And in the weary way that people get used to dysfunction, no one else complained. Rhee says she marvels that her decision to shut down 23 failing schools in her first year drew howls of protest, while keeping failing schools open doesn’t excite anyone.

The Money Question

Washington’s business community has fussed for years about the schools because they turn out so few employable graduates and at a huge cost. The Chamber of Commerce says that only one in four jobs in the city is held by a D.C. resident now, and that 44 percent of Washingtonians don’t have even a high-school diploma.

Education expenditures can swing wildly depending on how students are counted and what spending is included in the calculation. But the U.S. Census Bureau, in a survey of education finances released in July 2009, says Washington spent $14,324 per public-school student in the 2006–07 school year, or about $6,300 more than the national average. The only states to spend more were New Jersey and New York, which have vastly larger corporate tax bases and far more upper-income taxpayers. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the federal government pays 12 percent of Washington’s education budget, a percentage largely determined by the city’s high poverty rate. That puts it well below Louisiana and Mississippi, but well above the 9 percent national average for federal support.

A simpler way of looking at it: Washington has budgeted $760 million for its traditional public schools in the fiscal year beginning October 2010. Using Rhee’s enrollment estimate of 45,000, that works out to $16,800 per student. Using the city council’s estimate of 41,500 students, it’s $18,300.

As costs have risen, enrollment has plummeted (see Figure 1). Affluent or activist parents enroll their youngsters in three or four largely autonomous elementary schools in white neighborhoods, or move to private schools, charter schools, or the suburbs. Between 2004 and 2008, Washington’s traditional public schools lost 13,500 students, while its charters gained 10,200.

What may be Washington’s last hope of stopping the slide from dismal to disastrous rests on the reform course chosen by its mayor, Adrian Fenty, an African American Democrat who has staked his political career and considerable ego on his pledge to improve the schools. After his January 2007 inauguration, Fenty courted and then summoned Rhee to Washington through her mentor, New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, even though Rhee says she initially “was not blown away” by the mayor or the job. Fenty quickly pushed through legislation that abolished the disputatious school board, won Rhee the authority to fire hundreds of central-office workers, and “has not flinched once through any of this, never,” she says.

Rhee’s Roots

Rhee speaks often about her Teach For America (TFA) tour in a Baltimore classroom between 1992 and 1995: how she struggled the first year until pairing with another teacher to team-teach a class of 2nd and 3rd graders. But Rhee’s experience a few years later with The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a better window on how she’s doing her job in Washington.

Political leaders have seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where they are a majority.

As Ariela Rozman, TNTP’s current CEO, tells it, superintendents had begun asking TFA founder Wendy Kopp for help attracting and training teachers like those Kopp was sending them. Rhee was finishing a graduate program at Harvard and had never had a management role at TFA, but Kopp tapped Rhee to head the teacher project as a spin-off in 1997. “The idea came from TFA clients, but Michelle brought the vision,” Rozman told me.

Rhee was a no-nonsense manager. She was so determined to fund The New Teacher Project out of the revenues it was generating through its training contracts with schools that she sorely underpaid her staff. For years, she resisted pressure even from Kopp to take foundation funding, said Kati Haycock, who is chair of the project’s board and president of the Education Trust. Even so, the project attracted a talented staff with high morale, little turnover, and fierce loyalty to Rhee. Richard Nyankori, who moved with Rhee to Washington from TNTP and now heads special education for the district, says Rhee teases him that he would throw himself under a bus for her, “and she’s right. I probably would.”

Rhee’s greatest success at The New Teacher Project may be how she left it. Start-ups frequently struggle when a strong-willed manager leaves: Staffers move on, backers temporize, and contracts slow as the new leader finds her footing. But Ariela Rozman says The New Teacher Project has grown since Rhee left, from 140 people and a $20 million budget to this year’s staff of 210 and budget of $32 million.

Kaya Henderson, who also moved to Washington with Rhee as her deputy chancellor, says The New Teacher Project’s management style moved with them. Policy differences are hashed out at the weekly senior staff meetings and at biweekly meetings of a strategy committee, which considers major initiatives. “We’re not going to leave the meeting until one group has convinced the other group. We all have to be good with the decision,” Henderson told me. Still, “part of being a good leader is knowing when to say ‘this is a good thing to do,’” a prerogative Rhee doesn’t shy from, Henderson added.

Rhee has pledged to stay to the end of a second Fenty term—January 2015, if he is reelected—and Henderson says “the rest of us are probably in it for the same.”

Bumpy Ride

Six weeks into the job, Rhee called her staff together with the message that “We are not here to do the bureaucracy better,” Nyankori says. Rhee told them that “that’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster. We are here to derail those trains.”

If upheaval was the goal, Rhee has succeeded. Teachers say she has set black teachers against whites and young teachers against veterans with her controversial 2008 contract offer. Congressional Democrats worry that she has put them between a policy goal, school improvement, and their teachers-union allies. Education reformers are nervous that her outta-my-way approach will wound their movement if it backfires.

Almost everyone has a Rhee story. As when the chancellor closed those 23 schools and scheduled a community meeting at each one but on the same evening, so she couldn’t attend most of them. Or suggested the elected city council was irrelevant and resisted its invitations to testify. Or arrived for a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce board with—surprise!—a television news crew in tow. Chamber president Barbara Lang says Rhee never thanked the chamber for testifying in favor of Mayor Fenty’s takeover of the schools, legislation that will be pivotal to Rhee’s success.

Businesses, foundations, and civic groups that funded and ran after-school and enrichment programs were similarly dismissed. A Chamber of Commerce project that taught jobs skills to high schoolers was dropped. The World Bank had outfitted and staffed college-prep resource centers at some of the city’s toughest high schools. When Rhee put the outside groups on hold, the bank diverted its $1 million a year in youth programming to local nonprofits.

Parent groups that used to be solicited—even begged—to help make decisions about dress codes, building budgets and staffing, renovations and construction, and principal selection now find themselves shut out. “Parents feel pushed aside,” says Cathy Reilly, who started a parents’ group to exchange news about their kids’ high schools.

Rhee urges parents to e-mail her with questions, and she answers late into the night (she says she answered 99,000 e-mails her first year). But at the public meetings I attended last spring, Rhee sat alone at the front of the room, talked over parents, moved about with an ever-present photographer, and left immediately afterward in a chauffeured Chevy Tahoe.

Rhee and her loyalists say with jaw-dropping insouciance that none of that matters because, as she told me, she’s “doing what’s right for kids.”

“The conventional rules and the people who play by them don’t get much change,” says the Education Trust’s Haycock. “Hordes” of people come to their table when she and Rhee dine out together, Haycock adds, and “I have never heard anyone say anything except ‘keep on keeping on.’”

Rhee and her senior staff believe that the ed-reform stars are aligned as they never have been in Washington, and that they have the brains, focus, and work ethic to leap at the opportunity. In all of that, they’re probably right.

Rhee visits with first grader Sasha Simpson.

The Front Line

Rhee and her top aides don’t talk much about curriculum change; their focus is people. “Strong principals, strong teachers—that’s what turns schools around,” says Nyankori. “That’s why we feel so strongly about this union contract.”

The Washington Teachers Union and its parent American Federation of Teachers (AFT) feel just as strongly, of course, about a contract that undercuts such union cornerstones as tenure, seniority, and worker solidarity, and that would set a national precedent. Rhee’s proposal to pay six-figure salaries to teachers who agreed to link their paychecks to classroom outcomes: that’s the “green” option. Teachers who choose the “red” option (green, go; red, stop—get it?) would collect far-smaller pay increases, but would retain job security.

Rhee didn’t say how she would pay for the salary boosts, although she implied that foundations would pick up much of the tab. Meanwhile, foundation endowments have plunged and local tax revenues have shrunk since Rhee offered the plan in summer 2008.

AFT president Randi Weingarten, who has largely taken over the negotiations from the local union, insists that the teachers and Rhee “share the same goals, the issue in contract negotiations is how to get there.” She proposes rewarding teachers equally with school-based bonuses, a nonstarter with Rhee, who is zealous about getting rid of those she calls “bad teachers.” Stakes are so high for both sides that they appear to be working on a compromise that gives Rhee some, but by no means all of the staffing and firing flexibility she is after.

Still, Rhee has some tools that other school heads don’t have. Congress gave her the power to impose a teacher-evaluation system without negotiating its terms with the union. The new evaluations, set to begin in the 2009–10 school year, will include student test scores and five classroom observations of each teacher each year. Henderson, the deputy chancellor, has let the union know that the district will likely begin observing teachers by video, too.

And then there are some test-score gains, which Rhee is counting on to build public support for her plans and ease the doubts about her style. Two years after Rhee’s arrival, scores on district-administered tests are up: 49 percent of elementary school students were reading at grade level, a 21-percentage-point jump in two years, according to test results released in July 2009. Among secondary-school students, 40 percent were at grade level in math, up 13 points. Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles, new respect among parents and civil groups, and more leverage to turn the troubled system around.

Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles.

Taking Stock

Rhee’s other successes aren’t exactly the stuff of headlines. Erich Martel, who has taught social studies in the D.C. schools for 40 years, says teachers are doing more lesson prep and trying to make their classes more interesting. “There are teachers who need someone looking over their shoulder and they’re getting it,” he says.

Long-neglected school buildings are being renovated or rebuilt, which could make them more competitive with some better-housed charters. Spending on professional development has quadrupled. There are art and music classes in every school, the district says.

Rhee’s most important achievement might be in the management fixes most people can’t see. High-school transcripts, which the schools used to hold on to and sometimes alter to boost graduation rates, are being centralized and scrubbed (the audit found that one-third of students weren’t taking the classes they need to graduate). Nyankori says he has lured back 155 of the district’s 2,400 special-ed youngsters who are in private schools, at a yearly cost of $141 million, with more programs and better case management, and has set a target return date for each of the others. Quarterly diagnostic tests have been aligned with year-end assessments: Unbelievably, the two were designed by different consultants, and didn’t predict or reflect the outcome of the other.

That isn’t to say that Rhee is anywhere near achieving her often-stated goal of making Washington the best urban district in the country. Even she attributes much of the test-score gains in her two years to the district’s ability to pick what she calls “low-hanging fruit.” Saturday test-prep classes have helped borderline kids pass their year-end tests, even while thousands of other children remain far behind because of weak basic skills. Accounting changes helped boost results, too: Children who were absent on test day now are counted as no-shows; before, they were counted among those with failing scores.

The graduation rate—as opposed to the drop-out rate, which is calculated differently—was up a few percentage points in 2009 to 70 percent, the district says. But some teachers and parents attribute that to a new “credit recovery” program that lets failing students retake courses after school. Martel, the long-time social studies teacher, says credit-recovery classes ran 82 hours per quarter at his school compared to 125 hours for classes held during the school day, and that teachers were told not to give homework.

Despite the celebrity surrounding Rhee and Fenty, the traditional public schools are still bleeding students, which is perhaps the ultimate, market-driven judgment. Washington’s State Office of Education—yes, this nonstate has a state office—says enrollment in the traditional schools dropped to 45,200 in the 2008 school year from 49,500 just the year before. Charters grew to 25,700 from 22,000. Charter enrollment is even more impressive if you look at the fine print: In 2008, charters enrolled 48 percent of public-school 6th graders, up from 36 percent a year earlier.

Michael Herreld, who is president of PNC Bank’s Washington region and sits on several local school-reform committees, worries about what he calls the “disintegration” of the city’s traditional public schools if Rhee can’t stop the enrollment decline. Any urgency to fix things would wane, and so would the schools’ claim on public revenue. That would have practical consequences: Washington doesn’t have school buses, for example. If more schools are closed, youngsters could be miles from the nearest kindergarten and its free breakfast and lunch programs.

The only way to stop the attrition is to “grow good neighborhood schools,” says Nyankori. Rhee illustrated the obstacles to that when a woman asked her about her plans for math and science education during a meeting in the spring of 2009 in the city’s northwest quadrant, where most adults have at least one degree and, often, two or three. Rhee said she had ordered more computers to support math and science programs, but learned when they arrived that most schools didn’t have three-pronged electrical outlets for the computers’ three-pronged plugs. “This is the level where we are…subzero,” she said, as the audience stifled a collective eye roll.

High Stakes

Rhee seems irked that policymakers see Washington as the laboratory of the education-reform agenda. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, at the same spring meeting at which she bemoaned the lack of proper sockets. What matters is Washington’s kids, not a national agenda, she insisted.

In fact, both are at stake. Washington is a natural petri dish, whether Rhee disdains the idea or not. It’s small and deeply troubled, is a foundation darling, has creative new leadership, and is pursuing the popular academic ideas of the day. Its big charter sector almost begs researchers to compare the two systems, and it sits in the spotlight of the U.S. Capitol.

I asked Rhee to name her biggest mistake in two years and she offered this: She could have done a “better job of communicating with teachers” when she presented her contract proposal and averted some of the antagonism that dogs her relationship with them. Since then, she has met with teachers a few times a week, she said, and finds the exchanges “incredibly heartening.” There are other tiny signs that Rhee may be trying to calm the waters she has roiled. With contract talks going nowhere in the spring of 2009, she wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which she insisted that “[t]hose who categorically blame teachers for the failures of our system are simply wrong.”

Around the same time, at a banquet at the Federal City Council, a premier business and civic group, Rhee thanked a consulting group for undertaking, pro bono, the school-records audit. “It was the first time I’ve heard her thank anyone for anything,” said the head of a major nonprofit. Her staff now concedes that a Time magazine cover of Rhee—standing grim-faced in an empty classroom, holding a broom—was a mistake.

That may be about it. I asked The New Teacher Project’s Ariela Rozman if Rhee ever called to cry on her shoulder. “Michelle doesn’t cry,” Rozman said. That’s probably a good thing.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and Washington-based education reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Podcast: Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky talk with Education Next.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Teacher pensions consume a substantial portion of school budgets. If relatively generous pensions help attract effective teachers, the expense might be justified. But new evidence suggests that current pension systems, by concentrating benefits on teachers who spend their entire careers in a single state and penalizing mobile teachers, may exacerbate the challenge of attracting to teaching young workers, who change jobs and move more often than did previous generations.

The design of teacher pension plans is a timely concern: like other public pension plans, those for teachers are becoming more costly. Employer contributions to pension funds tack on a larger percentage of earnings for public school teachers than for private-sector managers and professionals, and this gap is widening (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research, Spring 2009, Figure 1). Those data do not yet reflect the impact of the stock market decline since 2007: the drop in the value of pension funds means further increases in employer contributions will be required to fund promised benefits. As fiscal concerns force states to reevaluate the costs of teacher pension plans, officials might also consider the plans’ consequences for teacher quality.

In earlier work we highlighted the peculiar incentives for retirement built into these plans (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008). Most plans create large spikes in pension wealth accumulation for teachers in their 50s. These spikes act as an incentive for teachers to stay in the classroom until their pension wealth reaches its peak and then push them into retirement shortly thereafter, as pension wealth accumulation turns negative.

We now extend this line of research by focusing on the distribution of pension benefits among teachers of varying career lengths and the penalties for those who switch systems. We examine pension formulas in six state plans and develop measures of the redistribution of pension wealth from teachers who separate early to those who separate later. We compare existing defined benefit (DB) teacher pension systems to fiscally equivalent systems that treat all teachers equally and find that the former often redistribute about half the pension wealth of an entering cohort of teachers to those who separate in their mid-50s from those who leave the system earlier. We then show that this back loading produces very large losses in pension wealth for mobile teachers. Compared to a teacher who has worked 30 years in a single state system, a teacher who has put in the same years but split them between two systems will often lose well over one-half of her pension wealth. It is difficult to justify such a system of rewards and penalties on grounds related to fairness or teacher quality.

Teacher Pensions 101

Public school teachers are almost universally covered by traditional defined benefit pension systems. In such a system, the employer has an obligation to provide a regular retirement check to employees upon their retirement. Typically, a DB teacher pension plan requires that both teachers and employers make a contribution each year to a pension trust fund. The salient characteristic of a traditional DB system is that for any individual, benefits are not tied to contributions.

More specifically, once a teacher is “vested” (usually after 5 or 10 years), she becomes eligible to receive a pension upon reaching a certain age or length of service. These eligibility rules vary across states, but they typically allow a teacher to draw a pension well before age 65, especially if she has been working since her mid-20s. Benefits at retirement are usually determined by a formula that takes into account years of service and the final average salary (FAS), which is an average of the last few years of salary (typically three). In Missouri, for example, teachers eligible for normal retirement earn 2.5 percent (the “multiplier”) for each year of teaching service. Thus, a teacher with 30 years of service would earn 75 percent of the final average salary. So if the FAS were $60,000, she would receive $45,000 every year for the rest of her life. If the teacher were to separate from service prior to being eligible to receive the pension, the first payment would be deferred and the amount of the pension would be frozen until that time. Once the pension payments begin, there is typically some form of inflation adjustment, although the specifics again vary from state to state.

We examined teacher pension plans in six states. While the states were not randomly chosen (we inhabit two of them), their plans are indicative of many teacher pension plans. Because the composite effect of each system is hard to discern by simply looking at the benefit formula, we examine patterns of pension wealth accumulation by age of separation.

Calculating Pension Wealth

We use the benefit formulas of pension plans to estimate the pension wealth of individual teachers. When an individual retires under a DB plan, she is entitled to a stream of payments that has a lump-sum value that we calculate using standard actuarial methods (which take into account expected mortality patterns and adjust the sum of payments to reflect the fact that they are received over many years rather than at a single point in time).

The heavy S-shaped curve in Figure 1 depicts pension wealth (net of employee contributions) for 25-year-old entrants to the Missouri teaching force who work continuously until they leave teaching at various ages. The salary schedule assumed is that of the state capital (Jefferson City), under which teachers receive experience-based salary increases and are also paid more if they have a master’s degree. The accumulation of pension wealth is not smooth and steady, but rises with fits and starts, due to rules of eligibility for early retirement and the like. In Missouri, after vesting at five years, a teacher is eligible for a pension at age 60. Her pension wealth—the current value of those deferred benefits—grows fairly steadily until age 45. The curve becomes steeper at age 46 because of a provision that allows teachers to begin collecting a pension when their age and years of service sum to 80, which brings her pension forward to age 59 and earlier. Then there is a big jump at age 50, because the 25th year of service makes a teacher eligible for an immediate pension (albeit with a reduced multiplier). Growth in pension wealth continues to be rapid in subsequent years as the multiplier is increased to its “normal” rate of 2.5 percent. Then, following a final bump in the benefit formula’s generosity at 31 years of service (age 56), net pension wealth starts shrinking. As is evident, complex pension rules lead to pension wealth curves that are irregularly shaped and bear no resemblance to the smoothly growing cumulative value of contributions.

(Pension) Wealth Redistribution

The result of these complex pension rules is that teachers who leave the profession in their 50s receive more pension wealth (as a percentage of cumulative earnings) than those who separate earlier. To develop a measure of the resulting redistribution, we compare existing DB systems to a fiscally equivalent plan where pension wealth is neutrally distributed: a cash balance (CB) system. CB systems calculate employee retirement benefits based on the cumulative contributions, with a guaranteed rate of return. Thus, pension wealth is a fixed percentage of cumulative earnings, regardless of retirement age.

In dollar terms, pension wealth grows smoothly under a CB system. Figure 1 compares the accrual of pension wealth under Missouri’s DB plan (the S-shaped curve) with the smooth accrual under a hypothetical CB plan. This diagram readily illustrates the redistribution of pension wealth toward those who retire in their 50s from those who leave teaching earlier. Teachers who retire before age 49 in Missouri receive less pension wealth than they would under a CB plan, while teachers who retire later receive considerably more.

We have developed a numerical measurement of this redistribution. Specifically, to compare net pension wealth across different ages of separation, we measure it at a fixed point in time, and we also estimate the frequency of separations at different ages. In this fashion, we can calculate weighted averages of net pension wealth for winners, losers, and the whole cohort of 25-year-old entrants. When we compare the Missouri plan to the fiscally equivalent CB plan, we find that 46 percent of pension wealth is redistributed from those leaving teaching at an average age of 36.6 to those separating at an average age of 54.2.

We made the same calculations of the distributional impact of the DB plans in the other states. In all states, the degree of redistribution is substantial. In Massachusetts, for example, average pension wealth is low, but 61 percent of it is redistributed. The degree of redistribution is also relatively high in Ohio (49 percent) and Texas (47 percent, for new hires), while it is somewhat lower in Arkansas (39 percent) and California (36 percent). As in Missouri, the redistributive gains are concentrated among those who retire in their 50s, while the losses are dispersed among all early leavers. This pattern holds particularly true for Massachusetts, where the gains are concentrated among just one-fifth of the cohort.

To summarize, there is significant variation among states in the magnitude of the gains and losses compared to a simple CB system, but all states redistribute net pension wealth to a substantial degree to those who retire in their 50s (after about 30 years of service) from those who leave a teaching position after shorter periods. In addition to the issue of equity, this has serious implications for teacher mobility, to which we now turn.

Moving Costs

It is well understood that DB pension plans penalize mobility, yet the sources of these costs are rarely delineated or quantified in a systematic way. There are several factors that reduce pension wealth when a teacher moves. First, teachers who leave a system before they are vested have no claim on a pension. Upon termination, or shortly thereafter, any teacher contributions are returned with interest (the rate varies, and can be well below market), but the teacher does not receive employer contributions. This is a major source of loss for many young teachers, since most teacher pension systems have a vesting period of five years or longer and the vast majority of early-career teacher turnover occurs in the first five years on the job. In fact, nine states have a 10-year vesting period for teachers. With such long vesting windows, many teachers will receive no employer contributions toward retirement as a result of their work in the classroom.

Although the effects of these vesting windows are large, they are at least fairly transparent for young teachers. This information is routinely provided to those newly hired. Even for teachers who are vested, however, there remain potentially large costs from mobility, and these are less obvious. One cost comes from the fact that teacher DB pensions are all based on final average salary. When a teacher leaves the profession before normal retirement age, the value of her annuity is tied to her salary at the time of her separation. No adjustment is made for ensuing salary growth or inflation.

Other costs to mobility arise from the service eligibility rules for normal and early retirement. Teachers who separate from a plan with, say, fewer than 20 years of service will often not be able to begin collecting their pensions until much later than teachers who remain in the plan until they meet eligibility requirements. At any given age, pension wealth is therefore lower for the mobile teacher—who has left one system early and entered another system late—simply because she can expect to collect fewer pension checks. Alternatively, she may be able to draw her pension at the same time as the teacher who stays in one system, but with a penalty. Either way, the costs are substantial.

Switching Systems

Pension wealth calculations similar to those above provide a comprehensive method for evaluating the costs of mobility. Specifically, let us continue to examine the pension wealth of a hypothetical teacher who enters at age 25 and works continuously. However, now, rather than working continuously in the same system, at age 40, after 15 years in state A, she moves to state B, which has the same pension formula and same pay grid, and ultimately retires. We assume that she collects two pensions, one in each of the states in which she worked. The pure mobility cost can be thought of as the loss from moving at age 40 to an identical state, but with zero creditable service.

The hypothetical wealth trajectory described above is depicted as the dotted curve in Figure 1 for Missouri. As discussed above, the heavy solid curve illustrates net pension wealth for continuous service under the DB plan, evaluated at date of separation. The dotted segment represents the wealth trajectory for a teacher who moves after 15 years, at age 40, diverging at that point from the solid curve for the teacher who stays. For the first five years, the dotted curve is flat since the teacher must get vested in the new system. After vesting, the teacher is entitled to two pensions, one from the old job and one from the new one. However, the loss from mobility continues to widen in the following years, as the teacher who stays becomes eligible for earlier and earlier retirement, while the teacher who moves does not earn enough service credit to advance the pension from age 60.

Under a continuous career, our hypothetical teacher would obtain 30 years of service by age 55, qualifying her for “normal” retirement benefits immediately at 75 percent of final average salary. This is worth $626,088 at age 55. The split career of the mobile teacher means that she receives two annuities, each of which is for 37.5 percent of final average salary, but the FAS for the first pension is of course much lower. In addition, neither the first nor the second pension would be drawn until “normal” retirement at age 60. This means that five years of pension payments are lost. These two factors together reduce the net pension wealth to $219,163, a loss from mobility of $406,925. This is the gap between the dotted and solid curves in Figure 1 at age 55. The cost of mobility is 65 percent of pension wealth.

By contrast, under the hypothetical cash balance system, also depicted in Figure 1, there is no loss from mobility. Net pension wealth, the cumulative value of employer contributions, is a constant percentage of cumulative earnings, regardless of whether they accrue in one job or two.

Table 1 provides summary calculations of these mobility losses for all six states. A glance down the first column shows substantial mobility costs in all six states, ranging from approximately $200,000 to more than $500,000. As the table also shows, these losses are large in relative terms as well, ranging from 41 percent to 74 percent of net pension wealth for teachers who stay.

Figure 2 depicts the sources of these losses, as well as the variation across states. For each state, the full bar gives the net pension wealth of a teacher who stays in the system to age 55, and the bottom portion, in black, is that of the mobile teacher. The middle portion gives the loss from mobility due to freezing FAS on her first job. The top portion gives the mobility cost imposed by service eligibility rules. Specifically, splitting 30 years of service credit between two jobs delays the first pension draw and can also affect the replacement rate (the annual pension as a percentage of FAS).

The costs from the split in service credit are generally large and vary across states. In Missouri, Arkansas, and Ohio, these rules lead to a delay of first pension draw from age 55 to 60, while in California, the first draw is delayed to age 57. In Texas, the mobile teacher delays first draw to 63, but she gains a higher replacement rate as a result. In Massachusetts, there is no delay for first draw, but the mobile teacher sacrifices a large increase in the replacement rate that is awarded to 30-year veterans. All in all, the service eligibility rules for early retirement, pension bumps, and the like—little known to the general public (and, we suspect, to many young teachers)—can impose large costs on teachers who move.

Final Considerations

Our work offers the first detailed analysis of the distribution of net pension benefits among teachers of varying ages of separation and the corresponding costs that teacher pension systems impose on mobile teachers. We find that in a typical DB system, compared to a neutral system, half an entering cohort’s pension wealth is redistributed to teachers who separate in their 50s, from those who separate earlier. One of the main reasons is that teachers who teach into their 50s can start collecting a pension immediately, while teachers who leave earlier often must defer their pension until age 60 or later, so they collect fewer payments over their retirement.

This inequality in benefits produces very large losses in pension wealth for mobile teachers. We estimate that teachers who split a 30-year career between two pension plans often retire with less than half the pension wealth accrued by teachers who complete a similar career in a single system. Again, one of the main reasons is that teachers who split their career often cannot begin collecting pension payments as early as those who stay in one system.

Our discussion has focused on teachers. However, the problems we have identified extend to other professional staff in public schools. School administrators are always included in teacher retirement systems. The market for administrators in urban school districts is increasingly becoming national in scope, yet for mobile administrators retirement benefit systems with 5- to 10-year vesting systems can have a devastating effect on retirement savings.

The impediments to mobility—for both teachers and administrators—may be particularly problematic for charter schools. Many charter schools are part of organizations (e.g., Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP], Edison Learning, Imagine Schools) that operate in more than one state. Edison Learning, for example, operates schools in 16 states. As these schools attempt to replicate their school models, it is valuable to them to move staff from one location to another, particularly when they start new schools, in much the same way business firms relocate managers. As we have shown, current educator retirement benefit systems make such mobility very costly in those states where charter school employees are required to participate in the state’s teacher pension plan.

Such a system of rewards and penalties is hard to justify. To appreciate the importance of mobility, consider the large differences in the growth of public school enrollment between states. The National Center for Education Statistics projects that states such as Nevada and Arizona will see enrollment growth in excess of 40 percent between 2005 and 2017. Louisiana, Vermont, and Rhode Island can expect enrollment declines of 10 percent or more over this same period. Heavily populated states such as Michigan and New York can anticipate declines of between 5 and 6 percent. In a well-functioning labor market, one would see considerable movement of workers from areas of contracting demand to areas in which demand is increasing. In the case of teaching, however, the pension systems impose large costs on those who move.

The barriers to reform are primarily political. First, states have a coordination problem. It is in no state’s individual interest to facilitate mobility out of the state; to the contrary, states are inclined to keep average pension costs down by skimping on benefits for those who depart. In addition, the distribution of benefits within states between short-term and career teachers will be governed by the relative influence of junior versus senior educators in educator groups and state politics. Influence generally increases with seniority for a variety of reasons, and these are enhanced in the case of pension politics, because the benefits of pensions are far more immediate and tangible for senior educators than for junior ones. The opaque nature of final-average-salary DB systems, with their complicated eligibility rules, only reinforces this imbalance.

All that said, these barriers are not insurmountable. Similar issues arise in higher education, and yet the benefits of academic mobility have led many state and private universities to offer more portable retirement plans. As states grapple with the pension difficulties they now face, they should consider systems with smooth wealth accrual, such as the CB plan described in this article. Another alternative to consider might be a hybrid such as TIAA-CREF, which has features of both CB and defined-contribution plans and has proven popular in higher education. Such systems are more transparent, tie benefits more closely to contributions, and do not penalize mobility or job shopping among young teachers. At a minimum, education policymakers should consider experiments that provide actuarially fair alternatives to traditional DB plans for new teaching recruits, and evaluate their utility for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers.

Robert M. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas. Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

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(Also available: Peterson and Finn’s discussion of What Congress is not working on – namely the reauthorization of NCLB.)

Teachers unions and other members of the anti-voucher coalition were elated. For the first time, an ongoing school voucher program had been halted.

But the judge’s decision provoked a powerful backlash. Newspaper editorials condemned it; one cartoon depicted a school bus running down black children, with a crazed Judge Oliver at the wheel. The Bradley Foundation, John Walton, Ted Forstmann, and others pledged millions of dollars to keep the kids in school. Realizing he had reached too far, Judge Oliver reversed part of his ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court dissolved the remainder of the injunction. Even though an appeals court later affirmed the judge’s subsequent ruling on the substance, that decision was itself overturned in 2002 by the Supreme Court in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which found no violation of the “establishment clause” as long as students had a choice of school, religious or secular.

The anti-voucher lobby learned a valuable lesson: fighting school choice in the abstract is fine, but forcing disadvantaged kids out of good schools is risky business.

Five years later, the tables turned. School choice activists, myself included, celebrated the passage of the nation’s first universal voucher program in Utah. But it turned out, just as it had for the unions in Cleveland, that we had badly overplayed our hand. Making use of a little-known provision in the Utah constitution, voucher opponents put the new law up for a referendum, where voters killed the voucher program by a large margin.

The teachers unions and their public-school allies schooled us. Now our future prospects depend on how much we learned in the process.

Vouchers in Utah

Since the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris ruling, the school choice movement’s progress in enacting vouchers and tax-credit legislation has been steady but slow. Voucher and tax credit programs have been enacted by the District of Columbia, Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, but such gains have been offset by disappointing setbacks in states such as Texas, South Carolina, and Missouri, despite energetic pro-choice campaigns in these states. Even worse, courts in Colorado and Florida struck down voucher programs that had survived the legislative gauntlet. While each year since 2002 has witnessed new programs and a net increase in children enrolled in them, only around 100,000 students in the United States today are enrolled in publicly funded voucher or tax-credit programs.

So when a universal voucher program was proposed for Utah, the school choice movement jumped at the opportunity, even though it arose in perhaps the most unlikely of places. Utah’s public schools compare well nationally, with students scoring higher than the U.S. average in every subject and at every grade level. The state has relatively small urban, minority, and low-income populations, the key constituencies for school choice. Utah’s population is only 17 percent nonwhite, compared with 26.1 percent nationally; only 33 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch compared with 42 percent nationally. The state’s large Mormon population generally eschews private alternatives in favor of public schools.

Though Utah’s public-school system outperforms those in most states, it is not without its weaknesses. Problems are especially pronounced among Hispanics, who account for 12 percent of the state’s population but a much larger share of dropouts. While most Utahns give high grades to public schools, half of Utah’s Hispanics rank their public schools fair or poor.

In 2000, Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), a pro-voucher advocacy group, spearheaded by businessman Doug Holmes and given handsome financial backing by the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, took the lead. Like groups then emerging in other states, PCE promoted vouchers for disadvantaged youngsters, even though its long-term objective was to provide choice for all families in Utah.

PCE was encouraged in its efforts by a variety of groups, foundations, and philanthropists from across the country. The Alliance for School Choice, a group financed by wealthy philanthropists, provided funding for lobbying and educational efforts in states, like Utah, that seemed ready to consider voucher or tax-credit legislation. The late Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, economists whose advocacy of school vouchers began as early as 1955, had poured much of their personal fortune into a foundation bearing their name and solely devoted to turning their voucher theory into legislated reality. Meanwhile, Dick and Betsy DeVos (Dick, son of Amway cofounder Rich DeVos, is the former president of Amway’s parent company and was a 2006 Michigan gubernatorial candidate; Betsy is former chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party) established All Children Matter, a group that sought to elect state and local officials committed to choice. All three groups viewed Utah’s prospects favorably and supported PCE’s local efforts.

PCE focused its attention primarily on legislative and electoral politics. The organization’s first foray was a tiny special-needs voucher program called the Carson Smith bill, which was passed by the Utah legislature but vetoed by Republican governor Olene Walker. PCE and its allies helped thwart Walker’s subsequent election bid, and she was replaced in 2004 by a pro-voucher Republican, Jon Huntsman Jr.

While in March 2005 Huntsman reversed the Walker veto by signing into law the Carson Smith bill providing vouchers for students with special needs, the legislature fell just short of assembling the coalition necessary to enact a broader voucher bill. Again the Utah and national forces went to work, and in 2006 Utah was one of only two states to elect state legislatures that were more Republican than before. (The other, Georgia, passed its first school-voucher program, for children with disabilities, the following year.)

Led by PCE, the voucher coalition developed an innovative legislative vehicle. Bridging the gap between advocates of universal vouchers (favored by the Friedman Foundation) and means-tested vouchers (preferred by the Alliance for School Choice), the bill made vouchers available to all, but staggered the amounts by family income, with awards ranging from a minimum of $500 to $3,000 for the lowest-income children. Moreover, the bill provided that public schools would keep for a period of five years the difference between the voucher amount and ordinary per-pupil funding.

Hamstrung by a paycheck protection law that forbids the involuntary use of union dues for political purposes, the Utah teachers union proved no match for the school choice team in either the electoral or legislative arenas, and the bill was enacted and signed into law. But the union did not give up. Expected to file a legal challenge, for which the program’s backers were prepared, the union instead invoked a little-used procedure to refer the program to the ballot, which had the effect of halting the program’s implementation. A legal battle ensued over whether the procedure was applicable, with the union prevailing.

At that point, though months short of the actual vote, the battle was over. The bill’s opponents had moved the issue into the arena that is more favorable to them than the courts or legislatures: the voting booth. In that forum, when they are challenging programs that are not yet operational, the unions have never lost. In as many as ten ballot contests initiated by school choice proponents or referred to the ballot by unions, the opponents have prevailed in every one—even a Washington State referendum on charter schools in 2004—by resounding margins.

That record is not the result of unequal resources—Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper poured $20 million into a California initiative several years ago, and the Utah coalition reportedly spent $4 million, only half a million less than the unions—but rather of operating in the realm of the hypothetical. All the unions have to do is raise the specter that public schools may be harmed, and the electorate is likely to vote no.

All of the anti–school choice ballot campaigns have struck consistent themes. Utah choice opponents ran television advertisements warning about the demise of public schools should the initiative pass. One ad featured Utah’s “teacher of the year,” who worried that vouchers would “take resources from the public schools.” The furiously anti–school choice Salt Lake Tribune questioned the initiative backers’ motives, charging that these “adherents to the philosophy of the late Milton Friedman have tried for years not just to undermine public schools, but to eliminate them.” Other arguments focused on the issues of accountability for voucher schools and separation of church and state.

PCE and its allies, including the Sutherland Institute, a free-market policy group, gamely parried the charges, pointing to the poor performance of minority students in Utah public schools, explaining that public schools would lose students but keep most of their funding, and so on. The local school-choice team made some mistakes, too, most notably refraining from countering the signature-gathering effort with an advertising campaign that could have cast doubt on the nature and goals of the opposition. But overall, the campaign in support of vouchers was well run.

Regardless, in the end, 62 percent of Utah voters cast their votes against school choice (see Figure 1). Supporters failed to carry a single county. Opposition was even higher in Salt Lake County, an urban area where students were performing especially poorly.

The Milwaukee Model

The school choice movement is remarkably diverse in nearly every way, not the least in differences over goals. Disputes center around universal versus means-tested school choice, tax credits versus vouchers, and other issues. But most school choice advocates have set aside such disputes in specific instances so long as the ball is moved forward.

Where differences are increasing is on strategy, and the movement divides between those who favor an incrementalist approach and those who prefer bigger, bolder action. Considering that the movement is animated by a belief in individual choice, it is surprising how many advocates believe there is one right way to deliver school choice, and one right strategy to achieve it.

Among those who favor a one-size-fits-all approach, the Milwaukee voucher program is the preeminent model. It has endured stiff legal and political challenges and today provides educational opportunities for tens of thousands of disadvantaged schoolchildren. Yet Milwaukee has proven remarkably difficult to replicate. If only we concentrate the movement’s resources on a handful of promising states, some assert, we can create new Milwaukees; moreover, lesser efforts should be put aside to pursue that overarching goal. The largest and longest-running cloning initiative is in Texas, where over the past decade school choice advocates have invested tens of millions of dollars in political and legislative campaigns to create a large multicity voucher program, each time failing to pass any legislation.

The replicationists, for lack of a better term, miss two important points. The first is that all school-choice politics are local. Each state’s political, legal, demographic, and cultural environments define the possible. In one state, vouchers for kids in failing schools might present a viable option, while a special-needs voucher might be all that is feasible in another. A heavily Catholic state might favor tuition tax credits, while a state with large urban populations might prefer scholarship tax credits. The replicationists can summon at best mild enthusiasm for such cacophony, while incrementalists believe that at this embryonic stage in its development, the movement should promote every form of school choice and let a thousand flowers bloom.

The second insight is that the Milwaukee program was the product of an incrementalist approach. The original school-choice program enacted in 1990 was limited to one percent of the public school students and encompassed only nonsectarian private schools. The scope was limited because only a tiny program could be enacted.

Like subsequent school-choice initiatives, the Milwaukee program evolved in predictable ways. First, the program introduced consumers to the concept of school choice in a tangible rather than hypothetical way. Families watched as others enrolled their children in good schools, and demand grew to expand the effort. Those whose children entered the program developed a stake in defending it. New schools opened to meet increasing parental demand, and the program expanded to more than 20 times its original student eligibility (to 22,500 students), along with the inclusion of religious school options. Most important, the myths that can bedevil school choice were replaced by reality, leading even the city’s major daily newspaper to switch its editorial position from opposition to support. When the inevitable political challenge came in the form of a governor dead set on destroying school choice, the movement was so powerful that it forced the governor to capitulate and even sign an expansion. Milwaukee exemplifies the success and endurance of the incrementalist approach.

Indeed, the incrementalist approach has fueled nearly all the movement’s legislative triumphs, yielding the single most important insight for future school-choice strategy: choice begets choice. Even the smallest programs are worth pursuing because they can expand, lay the groundwork for additional efforts, or both.

Future Prospects

Does the Utah defeat spell the end of vouchers, or even a slowing of momentum? While any defeat administered so decisively when victory seems at hand is inevitably discouraging, the national impact of the setback should not be exaggerated. After all, similar ballot defeats in California and Michigan have not prevented progress, however tortoise-like, in other states. But to generate faster movement, we need to focus on tactics that register enduring successes. Otherwise, the school choice movement is no more likely to win its struggle than the Super Bowl is going to be won by a series of long tosses into the end zone. But if first downs are ground out a few yards at a time, eventually we will see the goal line pass beneath our feet.

Since 2000, the number of jurisdictions with programs targeted toward disadvantaged youngsters has grown from four to ten (nine states plus the District of Columbia). Two programs started with vouchers for low-income children or students in failing schools, four with scholarship tax credits, and two with vouchers for kids with special needs. Some observations about this growth are worth noting. First, in terms of outcomes produced compared to dollars invested by the school choice movement, legislative success in the form of new or increased programs was much more likely to occur in states that already had some type of school choice program than in states that had none. Ohio, for instance, built upon the Cleveland program by enacting a statewide initiative for children in failing schools, while Arizona added to its individual scholarship tax-credit program with a corporate tax-credit and two new targeted voucher programs. Second, the growth rate has been greatest in programs that have reached their initial caps. Finally, Democratic governors and legislators (such as Pennsylvania’s Edward Rendell and Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle) are more likely to agree to expand existing programs, or (like Arizona’s Janet Napolitano and the heavily Democratic Rhode Island state legislature) to approve small new ones, than they are to support large new projects.

Utah’s strategy started out as an incrementalist approach, but the Carson Smith special-needs program was too new and too small to dispel concerns that Utahns might have about universal vouchers. A modest next step—such as a program targeted to disadvantaged children, who generally perform poorly in inner-city schools—might not have evoked a referendum, and if it did, likely would not have fared so badly.

Currently, the state with possibly the brightest prospects for school choice is Arizona, where choice through charter schools, open public school enrollment, scholarship tax credits, and special-needs voucher programs has made it all but impossible for opponents to demonize school choice. When Governor Napolitano pushed a full-day public-school kindergarten program, she referred to it as a “choice” program (families could choose whether or not to participate). Though antagonistic to school choice, she signed the voucher bills and allowed the corporate scholarship tax credit to become law without her signature. Should a Republican succeed Napolitano as governor, universal school choice could occur either as a result of legislation or even by voter initiative, as the number of program beneficiaries begins to eclipse the tally of teachers union members.

A state like Louisiana—with a newly elected, passionately pro–school choice governor, a legislature that has passed school choice with bipartisan support, a lousy inner-city public-school system, a long tradition of Catholic schools serving disadvantaged students, and no constitutional obstacles—may eventually present an opportunity for a sustainable large program, though the Utah experience cautions against overreaching in the short run. A state like Missouri, with support from minority legislators but opposition from rural Republicans, may at best be able to enact a small targeted program at the outset. The ultimate goal in either case remains the same: education funding that follows children to the school of their choice, with schools as the means rather than ends in themselves.

One bedrock lesson of warfare is that armies never should outpace their supply lines. That is the mistake that was made in Utah. Though school choice should be as American as apple pie, as with any type of change people may find it scary, especially when the issue is the education of children. People may know the status quo is bad, but fear that the unknown may be worse.

In the case of school choice, familiarity breeds demand. When it moves from hypothesis to reality, choice is increasingly difficult for opponents to distort. The faces of real children in good schools are the best reason to expand and sustain programs—and the best defense against the inevitable efforts to dismantle them.

Clint Bolick served as president of the Alliance for School Choice from 2004 to 2007. He is now director of the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution.

Recently, however, researchers from Indiana University and the University of South Carolina studied the relationship between the prevalence of teacher unionization in a state and scores on the two main college-admission exams, the SAT and the ACT. To quote the study’s authors, their findings, which were reported in the Winter 2000 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, “challenge the position that teacher unions depress student academic performance.” Instead, they found a strong link between the presence of teacher unions in a state and high performance on the two exams. They even suggest that the unions are most often criticized in the very areas where their presence is conducive to higher student achievement. Specifically, unions are responsible for securing better pay and working conditions, which in turn attract better teachers. Unions also often press for smaller classes and lighter teaching loads, allowing teachers to teach more effectively. Unions also tend to raise the standards for teacher licensing, which ensures that only qualified candidates enter the profession. “Taken together,” the authors write, “these possible benefits of unions may enhance not only the status of teachers but also the educational climate to which students are exposed.”

It is important to note that this study is by no means definitive. There are simply too many demographic, policy, and financial differences among the states to make isolating the causes of interstate differences in student achievement an easy task. Nevertheless, the researchers’ conclusions are noteworthy and cannot be dismissed.

These findings may seem surprising, but not to me. I have always known that, by and large, teachers want what students need. It has always made sense that improved teaching conditions translate into improved learning environments. As is often the case, this research merely confirms common sense. Nonetheless, this important study is a strong reminder that the collective-bargaining process can be a significant tool for enhancing the prospects for student success. It powerfully reinforces the argument that the scope of collective bargaining should be expanded to include professional and instructional issues.

In addition to the traditional “bread and butter” issues such as salary and benefits, teacher unions should seek to negotiate class size, curricular matters, the content of professional development, the structure of instructional time, the organization of teaching schedules, and all the other professional and instructional issues that are now, at best, elective items of bargaining. Because these are not mandatory items of bargaining, representatives of management can and often do refuse to address them at the negotiating table. One way to change that is to change the existing legislation that keeps these issues off the bargaining table. Failure to do so deprives us of the collective wisdom of practitioners on issues about which they know the most–the needs of their students. Including teacher unions as partners in transforming public education is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Progressive union leaders have begun to recognize that fundamental cultural change in their own organizations is a precondition to broader reforms that will culminate in better education for students.

Hard-Fought Gains

A persuasive case for reforming the teacher unions can be made only in a manner that is sensitive to the experience and culture of these unions. This, after all, is not a matter of abandoning what teacher unions are; it is a matter of building on their foundations.

Until the mid-19th century, teacher unions were viewed as illegal conspiracies. As late as the 1920s, they were being prosecuted under antitrust laws, which were intended to promote competition among business enterprises, not to break unions. While these prosecutions did not prevent the unions from existing, they effectively constrained them to the most basic and immediate concerns with salary, benefits, and related matters. Not until the late 1950s did the teachers’ organizations begin to depart from the meet-and-confer (“collective begging” is what it seemed like to teachers) mode of dealing with school authorities.

The shift toward a more confrontational, industrial style of unionizing was accelerated by the New York City strike of 1962. Although the strike lasted only 24 hours, it changed the way teachers viewed themselves and their rights. In many respects it was a sudden and a shocking change; neither society nor many teachers embraced it immediately. It wasn’t easy to persuade even New York City teachers that unionism and professionalism were not mutually exclusive–or that collective bargaining for teachers was a good idea. It didn’t take long, however, for teachers throughout the United States to embrace collective bargaining once the New York City teachers took the plunge. By 1975 approximately 90 percent of the teachers in districts with student populations of at least 1,000 were negotiating their contracts through collective bargaining.

The industrial-union model that emerged from years of struggling for parity with management was a good match for the industrial-style schools of yesteryear. Indeed, industrial unionism has served teachers well. It helped them to achieve middle-class status and to launch college- and university-fueled professional careers for their children. It has also improved the terms and conditions under which teachers work. In many instances it democratized the workplace.

However, as the industrial model of schooling begins to crumble, so too must industrial-style unionizing. Teacher unions must lead the education-reform movement, not simply react to it. Whatever is to become of the “new unionism,” however, must be built on the essential commitments of what teacher unions have always stood for: democratic dynamics, fairness and due process, self-determination, unity without unanimity, social justice, and the dignity of all work and workers.

Why Change?

Just like today’s schools, teacher unions today are stuck in the past. They still expend most of their energy and resources on defending a very small minority of troubled members; they still define their mission narrowly in terms of bread-and-butter issues; and they still confine themselves to reacting to management’s provocations. Strong unions have secured important professional rights and benefits for teachers, but their power must now be harnessed to create a more genuine profession for teachers and more-effective schools for all students.

Our colleagues in higher education achieved the right to negotiate professional issues. Because they have a say about course offerings, grading policies, hiring and promotion of colleagues, and even the right to elect their “leaders,” college and university faculty members are more likely to have a feeling of ownership of their work and therefore responsibility for it. That right unfortunately was denied to teachers in elementary and secondary schools; in essence, teachers there have a so-called profession but little or no voice on professional matters.

New teachers now expect their unions to invest no less in meeting their professional needs (securing their opportunities for professional development and to plan, design, and implement new programs) than in the traditional union priorities, such as contract negotiations and grievance processing.

Teacher unions have not only the mandate from their members but also the responsibility to take an active role in education reform. Teachers ultimately implement any initiative. If an initiative conflicts with what they know about how children learn, it will fail. If it does not respect their professional knowledge and experience, they will reject it. Teachers ensure that reform goes beyond rhetoric, that good ideas are translated into practice.

I envision a teacher union that acts not only as an advocate for educators but also as a lobby for all students. In recent years, vestiges of industrial unionism have begun to yield to changes that promise to make public education more effective. The scope of collective bargaining has begun to expand from considering simply wages, benefits, and working conditions to negotiations on professional issues. Some unions now promote such practices as awarding salary differentials for hard-to-staff subjects and specialties; allowing students and parents to choose among public schools; transferring teachers based on criteria other than seniority alone; and involving parents, students, and peers in teacher evaluations.

In Rochester, New York, for example, teachers learned during the past decade and a half that the more their union promotes reforms and professionalism, the stronger and more credible the union becomes. We also learned that the stronger the union becomes, the more successful it is at promoting reforms that raise student achievement. By rethinking our priorities and collaborating with school administrators, the Rochester Teachers Association effected changes that involve teachers in planning and reform, alter the compensation structure to promote reform goals, and provide the training and support teachers need to be effective. For instance, we negotiated a new teacher evaluation process based on portfolios that include peer evaluations and that parallel the principles and criteria of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Teachers’ compensation plans now include pay for knowledge, skills, and additional service; accomplished teachers can now become “lead teachers,” assuming additional responsibilities in exchange for additional pay. Instead of having an industrial-style dismissal time, their workdays end whenever their professional responsibilities (as determined by the teachers) are complete. We also supported a public-school-choice program as a way to empower parents and students while providing additional incentives to schools. Teachers now have a formal role in the annual evaluation of their supervisors, and parents have a role in the evaluation of teachers.

Last September, the union and the Rochester school district negotiated a “living contract” that includes a mutual commitment to adopt “what’s best for students” as the shared value, the common denominator, and the litmus test for any proposal advanced by either the district or the union; to conduct continual negotiations to resolve problems in a timely fashion rather than having once-in-a-while battles; and to view collective bargaining as collaboration rather than an adversarial process.

By placing a priority on what we are for, not just what we are against, we began to bridge the gap between unionism and professionalism. Although this has been a rocky route, we remain determined to continue on this path in collaboration with school management when we can and alone when we must. Along the way, we have found it necessary to promote “creative insubordination” and “reform without permission” during periods of hostile and anti-union school-management postures.

TURNing Unions Around

The Rochester Teachers Association’s commitment to union and school reform is not unique. In fact, the leaders of both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) champion the very same impulses and directions. Prime examples are the outspoken support of peer review by NEA president Bob Chase and the position on not tolerating low-performing schools taken by AFT president Sandra Feldman. Local teacher unions within the AFT (in cities such as Toledo and Cincinnati, Ohio) and the NEA (Columbus, Ohio, and Seattle, for instance) have been pursuing similar goals.

In July 1995 representatives of progressive teacher unions from both the AFT and the NEA formed the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), with the express purpose of redesigning teacher unions to be more effective partners in the effort to improve education in America’s public schools.

TURN is a union-led effort to restructure the nation’s teacher unions to promote reforms that will ultimately lead to higher achievement for America’s children. The organizing idea is that because teachers are closest to students and to the learning process, they are in a unique position to play a powerful role in stimulating the necessary changes. Critical to creating high-performance unions is developing a network of reformers to share ideas, to create mutual systems of support, and to participate in the evaluation of progress.

With a grant from the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement, six TURN locals are involved in a two-year effort to demonstrate what additional capacity teacher unions need to successfully accommodate the expanded educational agenda of the teacher unions. By additional capacity I do not mean mainly additional funds. Instead, teacher unions must rethink their structures, goals, and core beliefs. In important ways, they must redefine their enlightened self-interest and recognize their responsibility not only to their members but also to their members’ students. In collaboration with the Pew Forum, TURN is seeking to develop articulated standards for student-centered labor-management relations and for standards-based collective-bargaining agreements.

At the 1996 AFT convention, the late Albert Shanker reminded the assembled teacher unionists that “it is no less the responsibility of a teachers union to preserve public education than to negotiate good contracts.” To achieve this, teacher unions will have to change their traditional orientation. They will have to not only protect the job-related interests of their members but also ensure the success of the education industry. They will have to recognize that teachers will do well only if their students do well–and that no community will long tolerate teachers’ doing well while students do not.

-Adam Urbanski is president of the Rochester Teachers Association, a vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers, and director of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) of AFT and NEA locals.

The teacher unions have more influence on the public schools than any other group in American society. They shape the schools from the bottom up, through collective-bargaining activities so broad in scope that virtually every aspect of the schools is somehow affected. They also shape the schools from the top down, through political activities that give them unrivaled influence over the laws and regulations imposed on public education by government.

As the unions put their distinctive stamp on the nation’s schools, the objectives they pursue are reflections of their own interests, which are often incompatible with what is best for children, schools, and society. This presents an obvious problem-and a serious one-for a nation that wants to improve the quality of its education system.

In recent years, certain scholars and even a few union leaders have argued the need for “reform unionism” and claimed that, with enough enlightened thinking, the unions can voluntarily dedicate themselves to education reforms that promote the greater good. This is a fanciful notion, based on a fatal misconception: that the unions can be counted on not to pursue their own interests. No such thing is going to happen.

My purpose here is to provide a simple overview of the pivotal roles that teacher unions actually play in public education-and to suggest why, if Americans want to improve their schools, something needs to be done about the unions and their extraordinary power.

The Rise of Teacher Unions

Until the early 1960s, only a tiny percentage of teachers were unionized. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was the only teacher union to speak of, and it organized no more than 5 percent of the nation’s teachers clustered in a few urban areas. The leading force in public education was the National Education Association (NEA). It attracted about half of the nation’s teachers, but it functioned as a professional association and was controlled by school administrators.

The watershed event came in 1961, when the AFT won a representation election in New York City. This victory set off an aggressive AFT campaign to organize teachers in other cities, forcing the NEA to compete as a union or risk losing its constituency. The early years of NEA-AFT competition brought thousands of districts under union control, with the NEA winning the lion’s share and maintaining its position of leadership-but now as a union rather than a professional association.

By the early 1980s, dramatic increases in union membership began to level off at a new equilibrium. As of 2001, this equilibrium still prevails and is quite stable, with the vast majority of teachers (outside the South) covered by collective bargaining. The NEA, which claimed a membership of 766,000 in 1961, now claims to have some 2.5 million members, about 2 million of whom are K-12 teachers. It has affiliates in all 50 states and is politically active throughout the country. The AFT has expanded by its own count from 70,821 members in 1961 to roughly one million members today, although only about half are teachers. As in the past, the AFT’s strength is in big cities.

Any effort to understand why the teacher unions succeeded as they did must begin by recognizing that their emergence was not an isolated development in the American labor movement. It happened during a time of spectacular growth among public-employee unions generally.

Several factors were responsible for this phenomenon, but a critical one is simply that the laws changed. Before the 1960s, states did not authorize public employees to engage in collective bargaining. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to enact a collective-bargaining law for public-sector workers, and over the next two decades most states followed suit. These laws created rights, duties, and procedures that made it easier for unions to organize and bargain. By the early 1980s, the percentage of unionized workers in government had skyrocketed from trivial levels two decades earlier to a robust 37 percent-where, as with teachers, it stabilized at a new equilibrium.

At the very time unions were succeeding dramatically in the public sector, they were stumbling badly in the private sector, in what was nothing short of a catastrophe for the labor movement. Why did teacher unions and other public sector unions do so well when private-sector unions-which had long benefited from union-promoting legal frameworks-fared so poorly?

There seem to be various causes at work. In the private sector, most employers know they will lose business to competitors if their costs increase, and this prompts them to resist unionization. Similarly, unions cannot make costly demands without losing jobs to nonunion firms, and this too limits their ability to organize and bargain. As a general matter, competition breeds trouble for unions; and over the past few decades, the private sector has become much more competitive.

The government environment is very different. Public agencies usually have no competition and are not threatened by loss of business if their costs go up, while unions know they are not putting jobs at risk by pressuring for all they can get. Government decisions on labor matters, moreover, are heavily influenced by politics rather than simple efficiency. In jurisdictions where unions are powerful, therefore, many public officials have incentives to submit to union demands even if they know the result will be higher costs and inefficiencies.

Given the lack of competition, and given the dominance of politics over efficiency, unions simply find it much easier to prosper in the public sector. It is no accident that the American labor movement has been kept afloat by the success of public-sector unions-and that the largest, most powerful union in the country is not the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers, but the National Education Association.

Collective Bargaining

When it comes to the fundamentals of organization, the teacher unions are like all other unions: collective bargaining is their core function and the base of their economic and political power. It is through collective bargaining that they attract and hold members, get most of their resources, and gain the capacity for political action.

The teacher unions bargain with school boards, which play the role of management. As the above discussion implies, however, school boards cannot be expected to behave like the managers of private firms in resisting union demands. School boards face little competition and needn’t worry that they will lose business by agreeing to union demands that raise costs, promote inefficiencies, or lower school performance. The kids and the tax money will still be there. In addition, school boards are composed of elected officials, whose incentives are explicitly political and less tied to efficiency and costs than those of private managers. Moreover, the unions, by participating in local elections, are in a position to determine who the management will be, and to give it incentives to bargain sympathetically-a stunning advantage that, for private-sector unions, would be a dream come true.

Union influence usually takes the form of rules that specify (in excruciating detail) what must or must not be done. In a typical union contract, there are so many rules about so many subjects that it may take more than a hundred pages to spell them all out. In many urban districts, where the unions are strongest, contracts may run to two or three hundred pages or longer.

There are rules, of course, about pay and fringe benefits. But there are also rules about hiring, firing, layoffs, and promotion. Rules about how teachers are evaluated. Rules about the assignment of teachers to classrooms and their (non)assignment to yard duty, lunch duty, and afterschool activities. Rules about how much time teachers may be asked to work and how much time they must get to prepare for class. Rules about class schedules. Rules about class size. Rules about the numbers and uses of teacher aides. Rules about teacher involvement in school policy decisions. Rules about how grievances are to be handled. Rules about numbers of faculty meetings. Rules about how often teachers can be required to meet with parents. Rules about who has to join the union. Rules about whether dues will be deducted automatically from paychecks. Rules about union use of school facilities. And more.

Union demands on these and other scores are not random or frivolous. Fundamental interests motivate their behavior and determine the kinds of rules they find desirable. These interests arise from the primordial fact that, in order to prosper as organizations, unions need to attract members and money. Most of what they do can be understood in terms of these simple goals-which entail, among other things, securing benefits and protections for members, increasing the demand for teachers, supporting higher taxes, regularizing the flow of resources into union coffers, minimizing competition, and seeking political power.

Note that these interests and the behaviors they entail need have nothing to do with what is best for children, schools, or the public interest; indeed, they may clearly conflict with them. For this reason, collective bargaining often leads to contracts that make little sense as blueprints for effective organization.

By way of illustration, here are some common themes that give substance to the typical contract:

• Unions are dedicated to protecting the jobs of all members. The rules they insist upon make it virtually impossible for schools to get rid of even the worst teachers, not to mention those who are merely mediocre.

• Unions don’t want decisions about pay, promotions, assignments, or transfers to be based on performance. As they see it, performance evaluations create uncertainty for their members, force members to compete with one another, and put discretion in the hands of superiors. The unions want personnel decisions to be based on seniority and formal education, which offer advancement to all teachers regardless of their competence.

• Unions seek to expand teachers’ rights by severely restricting the discretion available to administrators. For principals and district officials, discretion means the ability to lead and manage. For unions, however, it means that administrators make decisions about where, when, and how teachers do their work and how incentives are structured-which is unacceptable. Discretion is to be driven out, replaced by rules that define realms of teacher autonomy.

• Unions tend to oppose anything that induces competition or differentiation among teachers. This applies to performance-based assessments, but also to many other policies. They are opposed, for example, to differential pay in response to market conditions (which might mean paying math and science teachers a premium to attract and hold them). Unions want teachers to have the same interests, because this promotes solidarity. The notion that some teachers are better than others, or worth more than others, is stridently resisted.

• Unions tend to oppose anything that induces competition among schools. Most fundamentally, they want all schools in a district to be covered by the same contract, because the schools not covered (and free of the costs and rigidities it imposes) would have an advantage. This would be especially true if the noncovered schools were allowed to be different in other ways too, and if parents were free to choose, for then the noncovered schools might attract kids, jobs, and resources away from the union schools. The union ideal is that all schools be regulated the same and that all be guaranteed their “fair share” of students and money.

• Unions tend to oppose any contracting-out of educational functions that involves a shift of jobs and resources from public to private. This is true even if privatization may provide better services at lower cost. The goal is to keep public employment and spending as high as possible.

• Unions want contract provisions that require all teachers to become members and that force nonmembers to pay “agency fees.” They also want dues and fees automatically deducted from teachers’ paychecks, as this guarantees unions a regular flow of money and shifts administrative costs onto the districts.

The unions put the best public face on their collective-bargaining demands, arguing that what is good for teachers is good for kids and that they are just fighting for quality public schools. It is obvious, however, that many aspects of union influence (not all) have negative consequences for kids and schools. How can it be socially beneficial that schools can’t get rid of bad teachers? Or that teachers can’t be tested for competence? Or that teachers can’t be evaluated based on how much their students learn? Or that principals are so heavily constrained they can’t exercise leadership of their own schools?

It is also clear that union-generated rules add tremendously to the bureaucratization of schools. The unions are responsible for making the system much more formal, complex, and impersonal than it would otherwise be. These characteristics tend to undermine school performance. Schools tend to do best when they function in an informal, cooperative, flexible, and nurturing way-which is precisely the opposite of bureaucracy.

Little research specifically links teacher unions to school performance, so it is impossible to make an ironclad, fully documented case about the direction of union effects. The few existing studies have produced mixed results, some showing negative effects and some showing positive effects. But many of these findings are probably spurious, arising because the data are very poor and hard to get and the methodological difficulties are formidable.

The most recent addition to this literature, an article by Lala Carr Steelman, Brian Powell, and Robert M. Carini in the Winter 2000 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, claims that unions have positive effects on performance, and its findings are being touted by union enthusiasts. This analysis, too, needs to be regarded with care. Its measures of school performance, for example, are SAT and ACT scores, which clearly do not measure the actual performance of the schools (as the unions are usually the first to point out). And because these and other variables are aggregated to the state level for analysis, there are dangers in drawing inferences about causal processes (like union influence) at the school level. An analysis that minimizes these sorts of problems, and is the most sophisticated of the tests of union impact, was carried out a few years ago by Harvard economist Caroline M. Hoxby and published in the August 1996 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Hoxby found that unions have negative effects on school performance.

The most confident conclusion that can be drawn from this literature is that unions increase the costs of education, apparently by an average of 8 to 15 percent-and without (as far as can be determined) a corresponding increase, or any increase at all, in school quality. This tends to support the argument that, for a given level of spending, unions make the production of quality education more difficult.

Local Politics

Collective bargaining is the bread-and-butter activity of teacher unions. The key to their preeminence in American education, however, is their ability to combine collective bargaining and politics into an integrated strategy for promoting union objectives.

Teacher unions are active in politics at all levels: local, state, and national. In local politics the teacher unions are in the astounding position of being able to determine who sits on local school boards, and thus with whom they will be bargaining. Needless to say, the unions have strong incentives to mobilize for political purposes, to participate actively in electoral campaigns, and to identify and recruit sympathetic candidates. These incentives are all the stronger because districts make decisions on a wide range of policy, taxing, and funding issues of great relevance to union interests.

The details of local politics can vary across districts, due to their individual histories, demographics, and problems. But certain characteristics are common to most of them-and give teacher unions great advantages in the struggle for influence.

• School-board elections usually occur in off years or times and thus tend to attract very low turnout, often in the range of 10 to 20 percent. By getting their own members and supporters to the polls, unions are well positioned to prevail.

• These elections are typically nonpartisan: candidates are not identified by party affiliation. Voters are thus denied the key information that running under a party banner conveys, and this enhances the ability of unions to control how candidates are perceived and who is elected.

• Local politics is not very pluralistic. Teacher unions tend to be the only organized force in school politics. They almost always overshadow business and civic groups, and they always overshadow parents, who are not organized (outside the PTA, which has long been under union control in politics) and who vote in low numbers.

• Teacher unions are flush with political resources. They have money for campaign contributions, and they control an army of political workers (teachers) who are educated, informed, have a direct stake in the issues, and are organized for political action.

• Most candidates run for school board on a shoestring. This being so, candidates endorsed by the unions and boosted by their money, manpower, and organization are very likely to win.

For these and other reasons, unions are formidable powers in local politics. The upshot is that, when school boards make decisions about policy or money or about the myriad rules governing school operations, they tend to give heavy weight to the interests of unions-and may often depart, as a result, from what is best for children and effective education.

State and National Politics

Important as local politics is, the teacher unions have good reason to think more broadly about the exercise of political power. Increasingly, the big decisions on education are being made by state and (to a lesser extent) national governments, and many of these decisions have a direct bearing on union interests. Active involvement in state and national politics is more than an attractive option for the unions. It is a necessity.

The great value of higher-level politics is that state governments, especially, are in a position to adopt virtually any requirements, programs, and funding arrangements they want for the public schools. Whatever policies they adopt, moreover, are typically applied to all the districts and schools in their jurisdictions. When unions use their political power at these higher levels, then, they can achieve many objectives they might be unable to achieve through local collective bargaining, from more money to smaller classes to stricter credentialing requirements. One political victory can accomplish what hundreds of decentralized negotiations cannot.

Over the past few decades, the NEA and the AFT have acted aggressively on these incentives, and they have emerged as extraordinarily powerful players in state and national politics. A recent study at the state level asked experts to rank interest groups according to political influence, and the teacher unions came out number one, outdistancing business organizations, trial lawyers, doctors, insurance companies, environmentalists, and even the state AFL-CIO affiliates.

One reason for the unions’ success is that they spend tremendous amounts of money on political campaigns and lobbying. They regularly rank among the top-spending interest groups at both the state and national levels, and in many states they are number one. Probably the key to their political firepower, however, is that they have literally millions of members, and these members are a looming presence in every electoral district in the country. Candidates are keenly aware that the unions invest heavily in mobilizing their local activists and have considerable clout in seeing friends elected and enemies defeated.

Almost all of this firepower is employed to the benefit of Democrats, whose constituencies already incline them to favor policies the teacher unions want-more spending, higher taxes, higher public employment, more regulations, more job protections, more restrictions on competition, more collective bargaining-and who, with union backing and pressure, can usually be counted on for support.

Within Congress and the state legislatures, the teacher unions are aggressive, omnipresent participants. This is often true even in right-to-work states. They monitor all relevant legislation, propose bills, carry out background research on issues, attend committee hearings, keep scorecards on legislators, and bring their formidable power to bear in getting legislators to vote their way. On education, teacher unions are the 500-pound gorillas of legislative politics.

On occasion, they also use the initiative process to put their own bills on the ballot for a direct popular vote. Here, they can use their financial resources to bankroll signature-gathering and media blitzes, and they can unleash an army of volunteers during the campaign. No other organizations are so well suited to initiative politics, and the unions have gone this route when legislatures have failed to give them what they wanted. A good example: California’s Proposition 98, which was successfully promoted by the California Teachers Association in 1989, and since then has required the state to spend at least 40 percent of its annual budget on the public schools.

The teacher unions also exercise their power in administrative arenas. The national and state departments of education, in particular, oversee countless education programs, distribute billions of dollars, and have substantial discretion in deciding what the details of education policy will be and how the money will be spent. Within these departments, officials regard the unions as key “stakeholders” who have legitimate, ongoing roles to play in shaping public decisions. The opportunities for union influence are everywhere and virtually unobservable to outsiders unfamiliar with the byzantine world of government bureaucracy.

Often the unions pursue their policy objectives by combining legislative and administrative power. An important example can be found in their recent drive for teacher “professionalism.” This is a goal with obvious political appeal. Who could be against professionalism? The reality, however, is that they are active on this issue because their fundamental interests are at stake. By pushing for stricter licensing, credentialing, and certification requirements and for regulatory boards controlled or influenced by the unions themselves, they are attempting to control entry into their field and thus to limit supply and put upward pressure on salaries. This is a classic political strategy that other occupations, from doctors and lawyers to cosmetologists and plumbers, have long used with great success. The teacher unions just want to do the same.

The Politics of Blocking

Much of what the teacher unions do in politics is not about winning the policies they want. It is about blocking the policies they don’t want-a strategy that the American political system, built around multiple checks and balances, is designed to facilitate. Because blocking is relatively easy, the unions are usually powerful enough to stop reforms they consider a threat to their interests, and thus to protect a status quo that benefits them. In a time of widespread pressure for improvement in public education, this is the way the teacher unions put their power to most effective use. They use it to prevent change.

Consider the movement for school choice, which represents the most far-reaching movement for change in American education. From the unions’ standpoint, it is irrelevant whether choice is a promising reform. The overriding fact is that choice-based reforms naturally generate changes that are threatening to the unions’ interests-and the unions, quite predictably, oppose them. Much of their political activity over the past decade has been dedicated to the simple goal of blocking school choice.

The unions see vouchers as a survival issue. Vouchers would allow money and children to flow from public to private: threatening a drop in public employment and in union membership; dispersing teachers to private schools, where it is much harder for unions to organize; promoting competition among schools, which puts union schools at a disadvantage; and creating a less regulated system in which the unions have less power. Small wonder, then, that the unions have done everything they can to defeat vouchers-even when vouchers are proposed solely for the neediest of children.

The teacher unions are also battling against charter schools-which, while public, need not be unionized, and which draw students and money away from the regular public schools where union members teach. Unions sometimes claim to “support” charter proposals, but these are strategic moves designed to head off something much worse: vouchers. Moreover, they are typically accompanied by demands for strict ceilings on the number of charters, requirements that charters be unionized, and extensive district controls. Charters are on the rise nationwide, but for now most are constrained by laws that have been heavily influenced by the unions.

The teacher unions are also fighting privatization. In the 1990s, for-profit companies sought contracts with districts to run entire schools, typically those regarded as failing. The unions recognize that they have less control over private contractors than over the districts, and that the success of private contractors could well promote the flow of jobs, money, and control from public to private schools. They have done what they can, accordingly, to prevent school boards from entering into such agreements and to sabotage those that get past them.

The bottom line is that the teacher unions’ greatest power is not the ability to get what they want, but rather the ability to stifle reforms that threaten their interests. School choice is not the only reform they oppose-for union interests are deeply rooted in the status quo, and most changes of any consequence create problems for them. The result is that, as our nation has struggled to improve its public schools, the teacher unions have emerged as the fiercest, most powerful defenders of the status quo, and the single greatest obstacle to the reform of American education.

Introducing Competition

For reform to succeed, something concrete must be done to remove the education system from the unions’ grip. This won’t be easy, because the unions can (and regularly do) use their power to “persuade” reformers to turn their sights elsewhere. Most Democrats, in particular, would be committing political suicide by trying to alter the unions’ current role in public education, and they will resist any efforts to do so. In a political system of checks and balances, this alone will be enough to block most reform proposals most of the time.

If the future holds a solution to the problem of union power, it will probably develop as a by-product of the school-choice movement. The best bet is that, despite union opposition, school choice in various forms will gradually spread. As it does, the unions will be faced with an increasingly competitive environment. Children and resources will begin to flow to nonunion schools, and unions will find themselves with fewer members, less money, and a growing number of schools and teachers that are outside the traditional system and difficult to organize. Competition spells trouble for unions. It undermines their organizational strength-and with it, their political power.

Whether choice and competition will ultimately win out remains to be seen. In the meantime, the teacher unions will reign as the preeminent power in American education, and they will continue to give us public schools in their own image.

-Terry M. Moe is a professor of political science at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public (Brookings, 2001).

A new strain of thinking within the teacher unions holds that collective bargaining can advance reform goals. Critics warn that this is simply a back door to tighter control over the educational enterprise.

Teacher unions, long both the whipping boys and the power brokers of the education wars, now promote themselves as key partners in reform. The idea is to use collective bargaining to force changes that will ultimately raise student achievement. In fact, several urban union locals, in Cincinnati, Denver, and Rochester, to name a few, have already agreed to reforms such as merit pay, peer review, and public school choice. Yet the unions are still widely regarded as anti-reform—as the chief opponents of any change that upsets the flow of resources to public schools and public employees. Critics warn that unions will agree to only those reforms that tighten their control over the teaching profession and the educational enterprise. Is it possible for unions to shed their adversarial, industrial-era approach in favor of collaboration and professionalism?

• Terry M. Moe reminds us that a union exists mainly to protect its members
• Charles Taylor Kerchner insists that the unions are too important not to involve them in reform
• Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association, calls upon his peers to retool their approach for the 21st century

The most influential voices in American education during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were surely Horace Mann and John Dewey, respectively. But who ranks as the most consequential figure of the past 50 years? One of the many leaders who claimed the mantle of “education president”? A particularly influential U.S. secretary of education? A renowned education theorist? A pathbreaking state education official or schools superintendent?

Consider, instead, the late Albert Shanker—the president of a teacher union and not even the largest one at that. Writing in the New Republic, Sara Mosle called Shanker, the legendary head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997, “our Dewey, the most important American educator in half a century.” The notion is astonishing—akin to claiming that the president of the United Auto Workers was responsible for the most important developments in the American automobile industry—yet well justified.

As one of the founding fathers of teacher unionism in New York City during the early 1960s, Shanker helped to create a movement that has become an enormous, if not the dominant, force in K-12 public education. During the 1980s and 1990s, he sought to transform teacher unions into a powerful voice for education reform, proposing ideas that were highly unconventional for a union president. In fact, the modern accountability movement, right through to the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, owes much to Shanker’s relentless calls for higher standards, assessments, and consequences for poor performance. Shanker was also an early proponent of public school choice, charter schools (some even credit him with the idea), rigorous knowledge and skills testing for teachers, and extra pay for master teachers. His support for these reforms sharply distinguished him from the leadership of the nation’s largest teacher union, the National Education Association (NEA). By openly acknowledging the shortcomings of public schools and embracing innovation, he became a much more credible and effective voice for public education than the NEA or other defenders of the status quo.

Bipartisan Praise

Shanker’s effectiveness as a leader stemmed from his unique combination of gifts. He was a union leader who could quote Aristotle and an intellectual who knew how to run a meeting. His innovative thinking drew invitations to teach from Hunter College and Harvard. Shanker was asked to join the boards of the Spencer Foundation and the Twentieth Century Fund, “one of only a handful of labor leaders to serve as a foundation trustee,” one expert noted. At the same time, Shanker transformed the AFT, Education Week marveled, “into a labor union that often acts like a think tank.”

He did not always come up with original ideas, but he took good ones and spread them through the 1,300 “Where We Stand” columns that he wrote in his lifetime; the column, a paid advertisement now written by Shanker’s successor, still runs in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. “The impact was extraordinary,” said the late U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “Union leaders in those days rarely wrote essays, still less felicitous, thoughtful analysis of public policies.” Today every leader with some institutional money, including the presidents of the NEA and the AFT, seems to have a paid column, but none reads like Shanker’s “Where We Stand.” Shanker’s intellect and skills as a debater were backed by a forceful personality and real-world power. His power, in turn, was bolstered by longevity: while he ruled the AFT for 23 straight years, the president of the NEA is term-limited.

Shanker gained a hearing for his ideas from both liberals and conservatives, not by taking moderate positions that consistently split the difference, but by embracing a coherent philosophy that sometimes led to “liberal” policy conclusions, other times to “conservative” ones. Shanker allied with liberals on trade unionism, public schools, and economic equality, while finding common cause with conservatives on issues like standards, public school choice, racial preferences, bilingual education, and communism. At the height of the war between Ronald Reagan and organized labor, the AFT invited the president to speak at its convention, and Reagan accepted.

To be sure, Shanker’s legacy is still a matter of some debate. Critics contend that Shanker’s words and his union’s actions were often worlds apart, particularly during Shanker’s later years as president of the AFT. For instance, in his 1997 book The Teacher Unions, Myron Lieberman argued, “The neoconservative notion that the AFT is a more enlightened union or more hospitable to educational reform or innovation [than the NEA] resulted from AFT president Albert Shanker’s ability to manipulate media, not to any substantive differences between the unions.”

While it is true that the AFT’s local unions, locked in hardball urban political struggles and pressing mainly bread-and-butter issues, often strayed from Shanker’s bold vision, his leadership on a variety of issues exerted broad influence—mostly for the better—on the course of education reform. His weekly “Where We Stand” columns did so much more than merely cheerlead for public education and nurture the mom-and-apple-pie view of teachers, which is what one might expect from an advertorial run by a labor union. Shanker was as apt to criticize public schools as he was to condemn those who would eviscerate them, as likely to call for higher standards for teachers as he was to protect their tenure rights. His influence can still be felt most palpably in four areas: teacher unionism; the standards movement; the choice movement; and the adoption of reforms to improve teacher quality.

Organization Man

Until the fledgling United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City won collective-bargaining rights in 1961, teacher unions were impotent. It had been considered pointless to organize teachers, or other public employees for that matter, because it generally was (and is) illegal for public servants to go on strike. The NEA, then a loose professional association, opposed collective bargaining as “unprofessional” and fought hard against the principle in New York City and elsewhere.

Shanker, an official with the UFT during the 1950s and 1960s, and his colleagues at the AFT sought to test those assumptions. Shanker had been a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Columbia University, but he quit for lack of funds and became a substitute teacher in the New York City public schools, where he had once been a star debater at the elite Stuyvesant High School. He soon became a union organizer and, in the years to follow, he would serve two jail sentences for his unlawful strike activities. Militancy worked, however, and teacher unionization spread rapidly: the AFT signed up thousands of new members. This forced the much larger NEA to change its position on collective bargaining. Now teachers are the most unionized sector in the workforce. While trade unionism was in general decline, the AFT grew from 71,000 members in 1961 to close to one million at the time of Shanker’s death in 1997. He was, wrote Mosle, “one of [the 20th] century’s greatest labor organizers.” The UFT’s example helped to spark unionization among other civil servants, from about 5 percent of public workers in the early 1960s to 43 percent today. At Shanker’s memorial service in 1997, Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarked, “If, as Emerson wrote, an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, the public employees unions are singularly the mark of Al Shanker’s inspired life.”

Shanker acknowledged that the goals of teacher unions and the needs of students and effective schools could sometimes come into conflict. Initially he focused on traditional union activities: building the membership and securing better salaries, benefits, and protections for teachers. But as the AFT and NEA grew entrenched and powerful, Shanker attempted to recast teacher unionism as a force that looked beyond teachers’ narrow interests. Along the way, he transformed his image from union hothead to educational statesman. Shanker’s key insight was that he could motivate his members to push for better public schools by holding up the threat of school vouchers.

Shanker realized that the transformation of vouchers from a theoretical idea proposed by conservative economists in the 1950s to a viable political threat by the late 1970s gave union leaders the opportunity to engage in public school reform as never before. It was not only an opportunity, but a necessity. After all, if the public schools continued to underperform, the nation’s confidence in public education itself—which to Shanker was both a positive democratic force in society and the root of union leverage—would dissipate. Shanker thundered at union delegates: “It is as much your duty to preserve public education as it is to negotiate a good contract.”

Setting the Standard

As part of his reformist message, Shanker became a leading promoter of the standards movement. Indeed, no one is more responsible for its emergence than Albert Shanker. Today standards lie at the core of education reform packages put forth by presidents as ideologically disparate as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but the idea was not always so widely accepted. For years, standards were opposed by a coalition of liberals and conservatives, though for different reasons. Liberals worried that poor and minority students would be penalized by high-stakes tests, while conservatives wanted to preserve the “local control” of schools.

The turning point came in 1983, when the Reagan administration’s National Commission on Excellence in Education issued the A Nation at Risk report (see the Spring 2003 issue of Education Next for a retrospective on the Risk report). The report bemoaned the nation’s declining test scores and the absence of a serious curriculum in American public schools. While the NEA and the rest of the education establishment lined up to assail the report, AFT president Shanker shocked observers by endorsing the report’s findings. In so doing, he helped to secure Risk‘s lasting influence. “It was vital that someone with stature step up,” said Milton Goldberg, the commission’s executive director. “Al Shanker never wavered on that issue, and the rest of the education community and public finally caught up to him.”

Without Shanker, the AFT was likely to have joined the opposition, potentially crippling the report. Current AFT president Sandra Feldman explained to journalist Sara Mosle that when advance copies of Risk were circulated on the eve of a union convention in 1983, “We all had this visceral reaction to it. You know, -This is horrible. They’re attacking teachers.’ Everyone was watching Al to hear his response. When Al finished reading the report, he closed the book and looked up at all of us and said, -The report is right, and not only that, we should say that before our members.’ And that’s what he did. It was a really courageous thing for him to do.” The AFT had always backed tough disciplinary standards (which was clearly in the self-interest of teachers), but the new focus on academics would require much more of, and place greater pressure on, rank-and-file teachers.

A Nation at Risk helped to launch the modern education reform movement. Beginning in the late 1980s, Shanker pushed hard for state and federal legislation to raise academic standards, and he kept the pressure on for educational testing and consequences for poor performance. He reminded officials that when he was a teacher and gave an exam or quiz, the students always asked, “Does it count?” During the 1994 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which ultimately forced the states to begin developing their accountability systems, Shanker was a staunch proponent of tough standards, and penned a pivotal article blasting a proposal to water down the bill. After President Clinton devoted much of his 1997 State of the Union address to standards, he called the then-ailing Shanker and told him, “Al, this is your agenda. We should have listened to you sooner.”

Whereas the NEA leadership supported bilingual education and racial preferences, Shanker raised objections to both, in part because he thought they held minority students to lower standards. Even today, the AFT continues to lend some support to standards-based reform, while the NEA has opposed high-stakes testing, supported parents who boycott tests, and funded researchers to try to undermine standards-based reform.

Freedom with Accountability

Shanker later made an inspired link between his push for standards and the nascent idea of charter schools, publicly funded schools that would operate independently of school districts but be subject to tough performance requirements. In 1996, Shanker told Mosle, “If we had a system of standards and assessments in place, then as far as I’m concerned every school should be a charter school.” In Shanker’s view, these schools should be set up by groups of teachers and parents who wanted to try innovative educational approaches. This vision differs somewhat from that of the management of charter schools by privately run corporations, a trend that the AFT has opposed in recent years.

Shanker began championing charter schools as early as 1988, though his contribution is a matter of some debate. Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch says Shanker “initiated the idea of charter schools,” while the authors of Charter Schools in Action credit Shanker with coining the term “charter schools” after visiting a school in Cologne, Germany. Others note that Shanker himself attributed the idea to a retired educator named Ray Budde and argue that Shanker’s role was mainly to disseminate and popularize it.

Before charter schools, there were district-run magnet schools and other forms of public school choice, of which Shanker was an early proponent. In April 1985, he argued that “the greatest possible choice among public schools” should be provided as a way to promote a diversity of school offerings and to better match the interests of individual teachers and students. The key difference between public school choice and vouchers, he insisted, is that under public school choice, “everyone competes under the same ground rules.”

With the NEA opposed to schools of choice and charter schools at the time, both reforms might have died without Shanker’s support. Instead, they have become significant parts of the education landscape. Public school choice has exploded to include more than five million students, a number that will surely rise under the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Charter schools served no students in 1990, but today they educate more than 700,000.

Alienating the Troops

Even more controversial among teachers than Shanker’s advocacy of high standards and public school choice was his embrace of a series of reforms intended to improve the quality of the teaching profession.

To attract good teachers, conservatives had long argued for “merit pay” as a means of rewarding superior teachers. To maintain solidarity, however, teacher unions typically oppose paying different salaries to teachers who possess the same amounts of experience and education. Shanker offered a compromise. Instead of basing pay on the judgments of school administrators, which might be open to favoritism, Shanker called for a system of board certification, like that used for doctors. Shanker’s idea, which was first outlined by teacher union gadfly Myron Lieberman, became the private, nonprofit National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Many states and school districts now provide bonuses to teachers who obtain board certification. Former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt, a prime mover behind the idea of board certification, argues, “More than any other single person, Al Shanker was the founder of the [group].”

Shanker supported tenure protections for teachers after a three- or four-year probationary period because he believed that it was an important tool for attracting high-quality teachers and protecting academic freedom. But he argued that tenure should not protect bad teachers and that unions should be at the forefront of “removing those who are incompetent, with due process.” In particular, Shanker supported a highly controversial experiment of the local union in Toledo, Ohio. The union had worked with the school district to institute peer review, a program where top-flight teachers evaluated new teachers and even veteran teachers who had severe problems. In 1982, Shanker invited the president of Toledo’s teacher union, Dal Lawrence, to speak about his program to the AFT’s executive council in Washington. Lawrence said he wasn’t sure if he would be praised or reprimanded. “Here we were, a teachers union, and we were evaluating and even recommending the non-renewal and terminations of teachers,” Lawrence recalls. After he gave his presentation, many council members were harshly critical. Then Shanker, who had remained silent for much of the discussion, told the council, “I think you’re missing something here.” He argued that other professions took responsibility for maintaining high standards among their members, and he endorsed the Toledo model.

Likewise, Shanker shocked observers in 1985 by backing a rigorous National Teacher Competency Exam for new teachers, similar to that used by the legal and medical professions. The NEA opposed a national standard, arguing that state-by-state minimum requirements were sufficient. But Shanker derided existing state-level teacher tests as the equivalent of asking doctors to pass a test in “elementary biology.” He backed up the proposal with a declaration that the AFT would limit membership to those who passed.

Progress on Shanker’s trio of teacher-quality initiatives has been slow. In 1996, Shanker told journalist Thomas Toch, “Convincing people to change has been a damn difficult thing to do. I would go into a state, talk up reform, and as soon as I left, the union attorney would come in and say, -We’ve got a great tenure law, let’s keep it.’” Peer review is limited to about 50 sites across the nation, and many states still certify teachers with weak exams—or none at all. National board certification stands at 24,000 teachers. On these reforms, Shanker was more successful at stoking the dialogue than winning over the membership.

On the whole, however, Shanker’s strategic vision paid off. By acknowledging the trouble with public schools and advocating radical reforms, he gave a positive voice to teachers’ concerns, keeping them in touch with the larger political dialogue. The tactic of the education establishment, to routinely call “for more money to address problems that they frequently argued didn’t exist,” notes Toch, was far less credible than Shanker’s approach: fighting “to change public education in order to preserve it.” When conservatives said public schools lacked the high standards of private schools, Shanker agreed, and he pushed for reform. When they said it was unfair to trap poor kids in bad schools, he agreed, and he championed public school choice as a better alternative. When conservatives criticized bilingual education and extreme multiculturalism for fracturing the nation’s social cohesion, the union leader concurred, fought those programs, and argued that private school vouchers would promote even further balkanization.

Shanker was committed to a strong union movement for the same reason he was a strong cold warrior and a promoter of common standards: in his view, they all served democratic values. In this sense, then, Albert Shanker had more in common with Horace Mann and John Dewey than just exerting a profound influence on American education.

-Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is writing a biography of Albert Shanker. His most recent book is All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice (Brookings, 2001).

The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education

by Peter Brimelow

HarperCollins, 2003, $24.95; 320 pages.

As reviewed by George Mitchell

Peter Brimelow aims high. In The Worm in the Apple, he seeks to emulate The History of Standard Oil, the legendary effort by Ida Tarbell that helped to usher in the antitrust movement a century ago.

While Tarbell’s villain was Standard Oil, Brimelow’s culprits are the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). However, though many of his concerns are valid and well documented, Brimelow is unlikely to earn a spot on bookshelves next to Tarbell. Unlike the self-effacing Tarbell, Brimelow overreaches with his rhetoric, distracting from and often obscuring his message.

For example, Brimelow considers teacher union leaders “commissars of [an] American Red Army.” The NEA “has chosen to metastasize into the National Extortion Association.” It exhibits a “persistent streak of left-wing loonyism.” Brimelow cites the words of “Chairman Mao Tse-Tung” to demonstrate that K-12 schools reflect “the most prominent outbreak of socialism on the American scene.”

Framed this way, Brimelow will at best reinforce the sentiments of those readers who already accept his basic premise. At the same time, he will be largely discounted by those whose support is required for real change to occur.

Brimelow is at his best in describing the broader historical context in which the teacher unions operate. He demonstrates how collective bargaining for teachers has produced labor agreements that stifle innovation and risk taking. He makes it clear that the dramatic rise in influence enjoyed by the teacher unions has coincided with stagnant and unacceptable levels of student performance.

Brimelow laments that little of this is understood by mainstream America. He correctly singles out the news media, where reports of the teacher unions’ activity and influence are woefully inadequate. He is on the money in claiming that “the teacher/school board conclave,” lacking such independent scrutiny, “effectively excludes other interested parties, such as parents and taxpayers.”

But what to do? Brimelow’s principal remedies involve a menu of anti-union legislation: repeal collective-bargaining laws for teachers; eliminate teacher tenure; enact “right to work” laws; and so on.

Brimelow lets these suggestions crowd out his other proposals-proposals that might be both more feasible and more effective. For example, rather than questioning the right of teacher unions to exist, Brimelow could have shown how effective unions are not inherently at odds with the creation of high-quality products. The auto industry, a leading example, illustrates how a market driven by real consumer choice, but with a heavily unionized work force, can function well. Instead, Brimelow’s concluding chapter seems to instruct readers to support school choice not so much because doing so might improve the schools, but because it will annoy teacher unions.

In the context of my own study of Milwaukee’s teacher union (with Howard Fuller and Mike Hartmann), Brimelow’s dire description of the national scene rings true. All the more disappointing, then, that his book reads more like Ann Coulter than Ida Tarbell.

-George Mitchell is a public policy consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

As reviewed by Julia E. Koppich

Will The Worm in the Apple someday become the answer to a question on the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history? The author, financial journalist Peter Brimelow, hopes so. Brimelow considers himself a muckraker, the term coined by Theodore Roosevelt to describe writers who highlighted corruption in government. In a 1906 speech, Roosevelt branded some of the muckrakers’ methods sensationalist and irresponsible-an apt description for Brimelow’s book.

Brimelow uses the plural to refer to teacher unions, calling them collectively the “Teacher Trust.” But he focuses on the National Education Association (NEA) and especially on that organization’s California affiliate-for which, conveniently for him, reform is often anathema. To be sure, Brimelow makes some valid criticisms of unions-the bargaining of sometimes too-rigid employment contracts; some unions’ “just say-no’” attitude toward reform; proposals for more authority without accompanying responsibility for results. But he also could have found counterexamples. He just didn’t look very hard.

Teachers embraced unionism for a simple reason: they wanted to be involved in shaping the conditions of their employment. In a recent survey by Public Agenda, more than 80 percent of teachers said that without unions, they would be vulnerable to the vagaries of school politics, and their salaries and working conditions would be much worse.

Brimelow suggests repealing collective-bargaining laws so that “school boards would no longer be forced to deal with the union just because a majority of the teachers voting in a certification election supported it.” He is half right. Collective-bargaining laws do need to be revamped, but not as an exercise in limiting democracy.

Brimelow accuses unions of “opposing every reform idea that comes down the pipeline.” What he means is that unions oppose those reform ideas that he favors. I was heartened when he referred to the reform efforts of the teacher unions in Montgomery County, Maryland and Denver, but dismayed by his flip dismissal of them.

Montgomery County’s school district and union are focusing on standards-based professional development and the evaluation of teachers by principals, with the goal of improving student achievement. The joint work of the Denver Public Schools and Denver Classroom Teachers Association has resulted in a proposed compensation system, to be voted on by teachers in March 2004, that includes differentiated pay. However, these facts don’t fit the story Brimelow wants to tell, so the facts are given short shrift.

Likewise, many of the ideas we regard today as education reform’s conventional wisdom-linked standards and assessments, consequences for poor performance, testing new teachers, paying some teachers more than others, and charter schools-were given prominent public voice by a teacher union leader, the late Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers. However, this doesn’t square with Brimelow’s worldview, so he ignores it.

While harsh on teacher unions, Brimelow makes excuses for journalists whose coverage of the unions is weak or limited: “On those rare occasions when reporters do cover the teacher unions, they find themselves overwhelmed by the arcane and incomprehensible.” Are teacher unions really more complicated than energy market manipulation, insider stock trading, or new medical advances, all of which journalists have covered with distinction?

Throughout the book, Brimelow uses a variety of linguistic devices to drive home his points. But his over-the-top language soon grates on the nerves. He refers, for example, to segments of the NEA as “covens of cranks” and to some union staffers as-this is original-goons. If he has a serious message to communicate, his tone diminishes it.

Sometimes Brimelow is just plain mean for the sake of being mean. In describing an NEA convention, he says, “You can’t avoid feeling that you’ve stumbled into a sort of indoor rally for human hot-air balloons.” At first the reader might think that Brimelow is making a semi-humorous reference to the tone of the floor debate. No-he’s referring to the delegates’ physiognomy: “An alarming proportion of attendees wobble and waddle with thighs like tree trunks.”

At best, Brimelow can be accused of false advertising. His argument is not that teacher unions are destroying American education, but that they labor long and hard to preserve the status quo. If true, this too is an unpardonable sin. But this book contains so little about education-virtually nothing about classrooms, schools, or districts-even that point gets lost.

In fact, Brimelow uses teacher unions as the device to reach his real agenda: “The problem with America’s government school system [Brimelow's name for public schools] is socialism. The solution is the introduction of a free market.” Taking on teacher unions may get readers’ blood boiling-union-bashing has become sport in some circles-but Brimelow’s real objective is to write an anti-public school polemic.

-Julia E. Koppich is president of J. Koppich & Associates, a San Francisco-based education consulting firm.