Conflicting Missions?: Teachers Unions and Educational Reform [Paperback]

Tom Loveless (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

Ask people whether teachers unions are good or bad for education and you are likely to receive a wide variety of opinions. A 1998 Gallup Poll asked whether teachers unions helped, hurt, or made no difference in the quality of education in U.S. public schools. Twenty-seven percent responded that unions helped, 26 percent that they hurt, and 37 percent that they made no difference (10 percent of those surveyed said they did not know). Although teachers unions were first organized in the nineteenth century, and collective bargaining has been a fact of life in most communities since the 1960s, the body of literature evaluating the impact of teachers unions on American education is surprisingly small. Conflicting Missions? helps close the knowledge gap by providing a clear, balanced analysis of the role of teachers unions in education reform.The volume emerges from a 1998 conference organized by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. The contributors represent a broad array of disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches, including some of the unions' harshest critics and most loyal supporters. In examining the relationship of teachers unions and educational reform, the authors approach the subject from several directions. They ask whether unions affect educational productivity, most notably in terms of student achievement. They analyze how teachers unions function as professional organizations concerned with the occupation of teaching, as institutional actors defending interests within a bureaucratic system of education, and as political actors wielding influence on legislation and elections. Reflecting a variety of perspectives and opinions, Conflicting Missions? offers a balanced analysis of a controversial topic. It is a useful starting point for readers who want to discover the complexity of teachers unions and their influenceboth positive and negativeon the national effort to improve America's schools.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

A former public school teacher and Harvard faculty member, Tom Loveless is director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and senior fellow in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is author of The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (Brookings, 1999).

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815753039
• ISBN-13: 978-0815753032
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,160,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Some good information on the effect of unions on education, December 7, 2004

By 

Henry Cate III (CA. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conflicting Missions?: Teachers Unions and Educational Reform (Paperback)

This is a well written book. It explores the connection between the teacher unions and efforts to improve education. In all the talk about problems in American Education there have been a wide variety of assertions and opinions about the role and affect of the teacher unions on improving education. The book explores the connection in depth.

There are nine chapters, each written by a different author, or set of authors, which explore different issues.

A couple of chapters address how unions bargain and the affect on public schools. The chapter on collective bargaining in the Milwaukee Public Schools had an interesting point about how teachers really have two sets of pay raises. Contractually teachers get automatic pay raises for their years of service and professional degrees. So a teacher with a Masters degree who has worked five years will get a specific automatic pay raise when starting to work the sixth year. And then every so often the teacher unions will threaten a strike and say the teachers need a pay raise, and then a new contract is generated. The public is only aware of this second set of pay raises.

The other chapters look at a variety of issues. One chapter explores what might result from efforts by the teacher unions to gain control of professional licensing at a national level. Currently professional licensing is handled by state government. The conclusion is there would be no improvement in the quality of teaching. There was a chapter on the NEA and school choice, which said that though much of the NEA is against school choice, there are some people within the NEA which tolerate or even support school choice. Chapter 6 explored what happened when governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania worked to curtail the power of the unions in public schools. The next chapter looked at some of the research the unions have done on education. Chapter 8 explored what affect teacher unions in other countries have on reform. And the last chapter focused on if unions could be a positive influence on education reform.

One of the surprising conclusions was that teacher unions don't really improve or degrade education. The various studies mentioned in the book do find that as a rule teacher unions end up increasing the costs of public education. But the book says that the teacher unions don't really affect quality in a positive or negative way. This seems to ignore the issue of when the cost for education increases with no improvement in performance, that this is really negative on education overall.

Fundamentally teacher unions are about helping the teachers, not the students. Teacher unions want to increase the salaries of teachers, make sure they have benefits, and improve working conditions. They may give lip service to worrying about the students, but there is no real incentive for them to improve the quality of education.

If you are interested in education and the affect teacher unions have on education, this is a book worth reading.