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Executive Summary

At a time when disappointing student performance, stark achievement gaps, and an ever-“flattening” world call for retooling American schools for the 21st century, the most daunting impediments to doing so are the teacher collective bargaining agreements that regulate virtually all aspects of school district operations. These agreements are a critical part of the problem, and the solution, to the educational challenges we now face.

Today’s teacher collective bargaining agreements are vestiges of the industrial economic model that prevailed in the 1950s, when assembly-line workers and low-level managers were valued less for their knowledge or technical skills than for their longevity and willingness to serve loyally as a cog in a top-down enterprise. They are a harmful anachronism in today’s K-12 education system, where effective teachers are demanding to be treated as respected professionals and forward thinking leaders are working to transform schools into nimble organizations focused on student learning. Collective bargaining contracts are especially problematic on three fronts:

• They restrict efforts to use compensation as a tool to recruit, reward, and retain the most essential and effective teachers.
  
  
• They impede attempts to assign or remove teachers on the basis of fit or performance.
  
  
• They over-regulate school life with work rules that stifle creative problem solving without demonstrably improving teachers’ ability to serve students.

Union leaders typically greet this diagnosis with a reflexive refrain: “What is good for teachers is good for students.” While superficially appealing, that sentiment is simply untrue. In fact, the results of the collective bargaining process are too often incompatible with providing a high-quality education for all students. Growing public recognition of this reality has prompted some reformers and visionary union leaders to embrace the so-called “new unionism,” but unfortunately this high-minded approach has so far yielded more wishful thinking than tangible policy changes.

As equal parties to even the most cumbersome contracts, superintendents and school boards must share the blame for the status quo. They should chart a new course by working with union leaders to modify collective bargaining agreements on five key fronts:

• Teacher pay should reflect the scarcity and value of teachers’ skills, the difficulty of their assignments, the extent of their responsibilities, and the caliber of their work.
  
  
• Pension and health benefits should resemble those offered by other organizations competing for college-educated professionals, which will entail shifting from industrial era defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans better suited to the new economy and a professional workforce.
  
  
• While reasonable safeguards are essential, tenure should be eliminated from K-12 schooling or, at a minimum, contracts and state laws should be modified to enable management to more readily remove ineffective educators.
  
  
• Personnel should be assigned to schools on the basis of educational need rather than seniority.
  
  
• Work rules should be weeded out of contracts, and contracts should explicitly define managerial prerogatives.

These proposals are hardly new, but the urgency of their adoption is. The first order of business is to remake the environment in which collective bargaining is conducted and the manner in which the resulting contracts are implemented. This requires a commitment to strategies that will increase performance pressures in K–12 schooling:

• Accountability: More results-based accountability is needed throughout the system, from administrators to teachers. One key step is the construction of reliable statewide databases that track individual students’ academic progress over time so that teacher pay and professional development can be linked to classroom effectiveness.
  
  
• Choice and Competition: Enhanced school choice and competition are essential to heighten incentives to improve student performance. In particular, state officials should eliminate obstacles to the creation of charter schools that operate free from many statutory and contractual restrictions.
  
  
• Tough-Minded Governance: District officials must shine light on inefficient contract provisions, push for fundamental changes in contract language, and fully exploit permissive or ambiguous language where it exists. In addition, civic leaders and citizens must support management practices that may create, at least initially, disgruntled unions and increased labor unrest.

A reform agenda based on these strategies can compel union leaders-- however grudgingly-- to recognize situations where the interests of their members are at odds with those of students, and to accept concessions that put the interests of students first. Such changes are essential to free our schools from their industrial era moorings and transform them into modern learning centers equipped to prepare citizens and workers for the Information Age that has already arrived.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI. Martin R. West is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.