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Conflicting Missions?: Teachers Unions and Educational Reform

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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.