EVENTS

Date:	Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Time:	2:15 PM -- 3:15 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

March 2006

A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century

At a March 29 AEI event, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts shared his vision for education reform on the occasion of the release of a new report on teacher collective bargaining agreements written by Frederick M. Hess of AEI and Martin West of the Brookings Institution. The report, A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century, is published by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Parallel to Governor Romney’s proposed comprehensive education reforms in Massachusetts--which include important changes to teacher collective bargaining practices--Hess and West propose an agenda for overhauling today’s outdated teacher collective bargaining agreements. These relics from the industrial era hinder efforts to recruit and retain excellent educators, restrict the ability of principals to dismiss underperforming teachers, and overregulate schools with work rules that undermine sensible management.

The Honorable Mitt Romney
Governor of Massachusetts

Education reform is vital because what children become, a nation becomes. A nation’s primary task is the development of its children. Particularly troubling in America today is the presence of an “excellence gap” and an “achievement gap.”

We experience an excellence gap as our education system lags far behind other nations around the world. In international assessments, Americans rank surprisingly low in reading and math performance at various ages--particularly when compared to other developed countries with similar resources. With today’s high-tech economy, our weak education system threatens our economic well-being. Americans are earning far fewer degrees in engineering and physical science than many other countries, particularly Asian countries. In order to maintain our superpower status, we must eliminate this gap.

Also troubling is our achievement gap--or the education performance gap between different racial groups. When we look at measurements of student performance, we see blacks and Hispanics lagging far behind whites and Asians within all subject areas and age groups.

It is essential to focus on closing this excellence gap, because this divide effectively jeopardizes our leadership role in invention and innovation worldwide. The achievement gap threatens to become the civil rights issue of our generation.

So how do we close these gaps? Well, we do not begin with government, with villages, or with schools--we start with parents. Home is the center of education. The ideal home is one in which both parents are actively involved in their child’s education and devoted to instilling education values and providing discipline and guidance. In the past few decades, however, there has been a disturbing increase in births to unmarried mothers. This rise has occurred across all racial groups--though at particularly high rates among blacks and Hispanics. Because parent involvement is so crucial to closing these education gaps, we should make greater efforts to encourage marriage before children--by removing unintended incentives for single parenthood, teaching abstinence in schools, and enhancing the role of marriage and parental responsibility.
     
But what about the topic today: how do we go about improving our schools? In Massachusetts, we noticed a sharp difference between how teachers unions and education experts responded to this question. Teachers unions consistently argued for more money and smaller classes. In contrast, the experts--or major education think tanks, such as the Grogan Commission, Mass Insight, Teaching Commission and now AEI--voiced support for faster intervention, performance pay, suspension of union rules, and more math and science teachers. When we analyzed the standardized test data in Massachusetts, we found that there is simply no correlation between what unions are promoting--increased school spending and smaller student-teacher ratios--and improved student performance. 

In Massachusetts, we already have taken significant steps toward education reform. We have set rigorous academic standards, including student testing and graduation exams, and have encouraged strong performance by awarding a greater number of merit scholarships. By 2010, we will be testing in science subject areas as well. Massachusetts has a strong set of charter schools with significant participation and funding from the foundation community. The state also has facilitated English language learners through increased English emersion programs.

From our experience in Massachusetts, we have seen firsthand that choice really works. When we compare education performance among similar students enrolled in charter versus district schools, we see dramatically different results. As charter school students consistently perform better than district school students, charter school enrollment in the state has increased significantly. We are pleased to see results; for instance, SAT scores in Massachusetts have increased significantly--and at a faster rate than in the United States as a whole.

We have taken the first steps in education reform in Massachusetts with increased testing. Now we can learn from the data, the experts, and the test cases to discern the best future course. The road ahead in Massachusetts education reform includes several vital initiatives--programs that are particularly essential in the most troubled districts.

1. First, we must focus on making teaching a profession. We must provide increased advancement and mentoring opportunities for teachers based on our state’s particular educational needs. Toward this end, we have proposed that the state fund $5,000 bonuses for teachers who can teach Advanced Placement (AP) courses and math and science courses, as well as for the top third of teachers.
 
2. Second, we must reshape and expand the authority and responsibility of superintendents and principals. School leaders must have the ability to hire and assign teachers, to remove underperforming teachers (particularly ones in failing schools), and participate in the evaluation and compensation of faculty. We must strive to remove work rule impediments from collective bargaining agreements.

3. Third, we must continue to measure our progress through annual testing and, in turn, link teacher training, evaluation, and compensation to the performance of their students’ performance on tests.

4. Fourth, we have focused resources in what we call the “Math and Science Excellence Initiative,” as we know these are subject areas in which we are falling behind internationally. This initiative involves increasing the number of exam schools (schools that admit students based on an entrance exam and specialize in math and science), ensuring that all schools have AP courses, enabling dual enrollment in state college and university math and science courses for high school seniors, adding 1,000 new teachers to the school system who have specific expertise in math and science, providing laptop computers for all sixth through twelfth graders, and training teachers to better instruct math and science. Additionally, we intend to create a computer system resource to enable students to better plan their future education. The system would outline, for instance, the educational decisions a student must make at each point in their schooling to be trained as an engineer and ultimately eligible for engineering jobs.

5. Finally, we plan to install a “mandatory” parental preparation program to provide parents with the tools they need to help their child’s education. This type of program is particularly essential in troubled school districts, where students are currently being left behind by our education system. In such a program, we would emphasize America’s education culture and its link to opportunity. We would highlight the importance of school discipline and parental support, and the need for students to complete their homework and learn the English language. We would teach parents how to manage television in their child’s life, how to take advantage of after school resources, and how to become more involved in their children’s schools.

How do we get there? How do we get to the point where these gaps have been overcome? At this stage, we know the answers--parents and teachers pretty much agree. But the strongest opposition to these aforementioned necessary reforms has come from some--not all, and not on all issues--teachers unions. In our education system, the relationship between management and unions has led to unusual and sometimes unbalanced agreements because unions have such a strong role in determining who comprises management. This is unlike any other industry, where management is chosen in an entirely unrelated process from the interest of unions. Because of this unusual imbalance, negotiations often result in the interests of students being pushed aside in favor of the unions’ interests.

How do we overcome this political opposition? It is challenging, but we are moving in the right direction. As people become more aware of education performance disparities across the country, we will likely see minority communities rise up and demand more from the education system. Their children are the ones being left behind, and it is clear that the old answers are not working. There will also be increased media coverage of testing results, which will help highlight which schools are succeeding. Schools that receive a lot of money and have small classroom sizes may have to explain why they are not performing well. Finally, the positive results of increased school choice will become more apparent; as people grow more aware of how much better charter school students are performing, energy will gather around expanded school choice initiatives.

Reforming education is a bipartisan need and a bipartisan issue. It is a national priority with profound human consequences, as well as competitiveness implications, for the nation as a whole. Each year, we are turning out hundreds of thousands of children with clouded futures who are unprepared to take advantage of the kind of opportunities this nation offers. This is unacceptable and unnecessary, and it is time we do something about it.

AEI research assistant Rosemary Kendrick prepared this summary.