Union-Made Miseducation

Although they still claim to be the last best hope for public education, the influence of teachers’ unions has wanted so much that criticism of the association’s and federations has spread beyond conservative and Republican groups to the school boards and superintendents that they once made and broke.

“There is a teacher I have hired and I don’t know if he’s with us on our team,” Baltimore Talent Development High School principal Jeffrey Robinson said at a recent meeting at the National Academies of Science. “I know the unions have their rules and something must be done about the unions.”

Additionally, I am hearing from public school teachers who want out of their union. New York City teacher’s union boss Leo Casey dismissed that claim in a seminar at the National Press Club.

“Taft-Hartley eliminated the closed shop,” Casey said. “Nobody has to join a union.”

“They do have to pay dues.” That this mandate would close an open shop did not occur to Casey, who heads New York City’s United Federation of Teachers.

“Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, organized labor as a whole saw its numbers (and, therefore, its influence) shrink from 35 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to just 12.5 percent—and just 7.9 percent of the private-sector workforce—50 years later,” according to Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “The two teachers unions, by contrast, grew dramatically during this period, from a combined 750,000 members in 1960 (just before the advent of collective bargaining) to 4 million members today.”

“Almost 90 percent of public school teachers nationally are members of the NEA or the AFT.” Kahlenberg’s essay was commissioned by the Urban Institute for its collection on Collective Bargaining in Education. This book of essays was published by the Harvard Education Press.

Ironically, one thing that teacher’s unions rarely do is go on strike. “By the 1975-6 school year, there were 203 teacher strikes, a record number,” Kahlenberg reports. “The strikes gave unions the power to disrupt the everyday lives of a district’s public school students and parents and put tremendous political pressure on public officials to come to an agreement.”

“Over time, however, as unions became more firmly established, the political climate toward unions changed, and as both management and unions realized strikes were detrimental to their images, the number of teacher strikes declined.”

So if they don’t perform the traditional labor union’s role of forming a picket line, what do unions do? “Teachers unions are the most consistent voice for education funding in state capitols around the country,” Casey avers.

Not too surprisingly, Casey is skeptical of school choice, and capitalism generally. “Natural tendencies of markets will create inequities,” Casey says. He does not distinguish between the temporary inequities of markets before new entrants have entered the field expanding services and lowering prices and the permanent inequality of a nationalized service that bars all competition.

It’s a quandary he may have to come to grips with at a time when even school reformers like Charles Barone, a longtime Democratic Party operative, decry the “inflexibility of union contracts.”

“Researchers generally have concluded that teachers’ pay compares unfavorably with compensation in fields that require similar preparation and time, although this point has been debated,” Susan Moore Johnson and Morgaen L. Donaldson report in Collective Bargaining. “For example, Sylvia Allegretto, Sean Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel compared teachers’ overall salaries to those earned by people in similarly skilled professions and concluded that teachers’ earnings were, on average, 12 percent less than those of architects, nurses and accountants.”

“However, Richard Vedder compared the hourly wages of teachers and nonteachers, counting teachers’ in-school contractual hours and excluding after-school preparation time. He concluded that teachers fared better than, for example, architects and civil engineers.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.