Unions (Part 3) : Teacher Support, Protection, and School Reform Flexibility

Today we will reflect on two aspects of unions that are very important as it comes to how schools function, but that often are overlooked by outside observers. These two aspects are (1) support for teachers and (2) flexibility with school day, structure and management approaches.

Teaching is hard work. Between planning, managing student behavior, grading, contacting parents and administrative duties, teachers have many different "buckets" to tend to, and it takes a good deal of energy, hard work, talent and experience to effectively manage all these areas. For the average teacher (especially in their first few years) doing the job well means getting support, and the sad truth is that managers in the workplace don't always operate from this support framework, but instead act strictly as evaluator, delegator, or punisher. While this could thus open up a discussion for us about school leadership, let's instead look at how unions respond to this reality:

1) Unions protect workers from unreasonable or unfair management practices, giving the teacher room to learn, make mistakes, and grow without the unnecessary stress of unbearing supervisors.

2) Unions offer avenues for professional development that otherwise might not be accessible to teachers. For instance, unions offer generous course catalogs of credited and non-credited courses teachers can take to advance up a salary scale and maintain their licensing. These courses are low cost or cost free, and address critical needs for staff. Unions also protect teacher time, which gives them the opportunity to pursue areas of growth through fellowships, independent research, travel, and graduate study. 



These aspects of unions are important and should not be dismissed by critics. At the same time, these services do draw criticism. For instance, critics could respond by saying:


1. teachers need to be held accountable, and unions protect bad teachers
2. unions shouldn't be in the business of providing professional development--it's not their core function, so it shouldn't excuse unions from obstructing reform and improved schooling.
3. while some teachers might advance their practice with time off, others might not. 


So unions protect teachers, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Big surprise. What can we learn from this little exercise? Well, it clearly places the union between the teachers and the management. So if management is working for reform and teachers are lazy, unions are the enemy. But if management is incompetent or corrupt and teachers are hardworking and skilled, the union is the hero! Clearly, on the teacher side, we know that neither extreme is the truth. Perhaps we should look at a corollary issue--what does management in a school actually do? How does management interact with, or should it interact with, the union?


While politicians make the rules, unions are still instrumental in setting them and this is frequently sited as an obstacle to reform. School leaders find union reps to be a thorn in their side, disrespecting and subverting well-intentioned efforts, and calling out minor infractions of work rules that might be counter-productive in the first place. Leaders cannot manipulate their staff when a vigilant union rep is around, and this truth can go both ways for the students. With tight budgets, principals can't ask unionized teachers to stay late without paying them overtime, and a series of issues stem from just this one conundrum. Questions abound about what schools could be without unions, and charter schools are a laboratory testing these hypotheses. We ask: What could we do with a longer school day? Longer school year? More flexibility with staff assignments? More options for holding teachers accountable? 


With experience as both a unionized teacher and a non-unionized teacher, and through my observations of what is going on at other schools across the nation, here is my conclusion on this point about unions, teacher support, and flexible school rules. I'd argue that the union is not the problem--though it also does not contribute enough to the solution. Rules in schools are not set by unions, they are set by politicians who are accountable to voters and donors. The unions do have a voice and this voice is generally used to do what unions do--protect workers rights. I would argue that this is not such a blatant cost to the students, because protecting teacher time, privacy, and academic freedom actually serves the students in many ways. By contrast, having longer days (one of the most sought after goals of school reforms) is not a recipe for higher achievement by itself. Instead, higher achievement comes from this equation:


longer days+good curriculum+good teaching+good social support=higher student outcomes


Charters that produce better results with longer days often have better teachers, better leaders, smaller classes, excellent enrichment courses and STILL work hard to protect their teachers. Taking away unions might take away some of the bureaucratic headache associated with reform efforts, but it would not guarantee that all the building blocks for achievement are in place--it could just as easily lead to more burn-out for teachers and students as bad/desperate managers pressure the school to do more, but not better. 


With all that is said here in support of unions, I want to emphasize that I do not support tenure nor do I support union "protections" that run counter to sound research about good student learning. 

Unions (Part 2)

In an earlier post (already 2+ months ago), I weighed in on the discussion about unions. Since then, anyone paying the slightest attention to the news would have observed a heated national debate on the role of public sector unions, especially in Wisconsin and Ohio. The argument generally breaks down like this:


Pro Public Sector Unions:


-Union negotiated pensions are earned benefits, protected by contract, and therefore ethically and legally should not be cut (though future pension benefits could be re-negotiated).
-Collective bargaining should be a right for workers in any industry. Especially for those providing public service it guarantees  that the workforce has a minimal level of negotiating power to keep salaries and benefits competitive.
-When compared to private sector, why are we asking why public sector "has it so good," instead of asking "why does the private sector have it so bad?" If the public sector unionized workforce has a compensation package that is attractive and the private sector workforce is struggling, shouldn't we be looking for measures to encourage a "race to the top" as opposed to a "race to the bottom?"
-Some public sector employees have already accepted pay freezes, unpaid furloughs, layoffs and other sacrifices. When will the the idea of "everyone pitching in" apply also to the richest sector of the population, who are growing wealth at epic levels thanks in part to government tax and regulatory measures?


Anti-Public Sector Unions, or Pro-Austerity:


-Governments are strapped for cash, and the benefits granted to public sector employees are unreasonable and based on an outdated evaluation of economic conditions.
-Collective bargaining presents a conflict of interest, for the unions are major donors to (mainly Democratic) politicians. Unlike private sector employers who must deliver profits to share-holders, politicians' main stake holders are also those they are supposed to negotiate with (donors and voters). Inflated compensation is the inevitable result of this conflict of interest, and dismantling collective bargaining would eliminate the conditions that give rise to this fiscally damaging decision making framework.
-The public sector unions are anti-competitive, and with their rules and protections make it extremely hard for government to adapt to new economic realities. Public agencies need to be able to change and streamline in order to provide better services and a more reasonable cost to tax payers. 


My assessment:
Is it unhelpful to say both sides are right? The problem with this debate is that neither side has the absolute truth on their side, and so it is impossible to determine whose predictions would actually bear out. A compromise agreement, well designed, could address some of the weaknesses of the current system, but if it is not well crafted it will do nothing beneficial. At the same time, no compromise almost guarantees the losing side's predictions will play out.


The real issue here is that this is NOT the debate most needed at the moment--we have greater systematic flaws that are projecting far more powerfully destructive ripples. Like Michael Porter at Harvard Business School repeatedly says, we need economic strategy. Our school system is outdated in it's entire design, our economy seems to be driven entirely by the interests of oligopolist firms and the uber-rich, we are still engaged in two wars, climate change rages out of control, and the ability to find sustained, national, meaningful discourse in the marketing and PR chatter is insanely difficult. Ultimately, if we discuss the real system wide changes needed to address much larger economic, social and environmental issues, in all likelihood a solution to the public sector union question would emerge naturally. 


Note: I am back from international trips to Israel and Spain, and am still working on getting to a regular posting schedule on the blog. Stay tuned for more on unions, this is definitely not the end of what I have to say on the topic. Also, please comment! Thanks for visiting. :) 

The Future of Unions (part 1)

Ok. One of the touchiest subjects in education. Here's my perspective, and being a charter school teacher I threw away my union membership 16 months ago, which may say more than anything else about what follows. In my view, unions are not the solution or the problem. The way the unions operate in our system today undeniably makes it hard to institute change. The most challenging aspect of the unions' influence comes down to tenure, and the way that tenure discourages teachers from innovating and improving upon their craft. Without any sense of being challenged when displaying laziness, a tenured teacher will only have intrinsic motivation to propel them. Given the emotional burdens teaching frequently causes, teachers need every form of motivation to ensure sustained commitment and effectiveness, and schools need to have more flexibility to remove teachers when they prove to lack in this area.

Thus, we begin this conversation about unions on the question of accountability. Teachers need to be held accountable for what they are asked to do, and more than anything else, having a demonstrable impact on student learning ought to be paramount in the way teachers are reviewed. Some combination of standardized tests, student portfolios, observations, and student/parent surveys could make up the bulk of teacher evaluations. However, the union routinely resists adopting such measures. The argument tends to revolve around what the exact measures should be, but in effect there is no system of fair evaluation in place. Unions should do more to welcome a system of accountability based on fair and transparent evaluations, with at least 50% of that evaluation centering on demonstrable and measurable student learning.

A system of accountability as just described makes up part of the incentive structure in which teachers work (or ought to). The incentives for teachers to perform well also include (a) teacher pay, (b) opportunities for professional growth and advancement, (c) opportunities for acknowledgement, recognition and praise, and (d) satisfaction related to the service of teaching itself. On points (b) and (c), the unions play a constructive role, offering courses for teacher development, protecting teacher time so they can learn, rest, and explore, and granting awards and presenting acknowledgements in union newspapers. The union has little to do with point (d) directly, and as it is now well known, the union plays a major role in the structuring of teacher pay (a). Let us look briefly at unions and pay.

The issue of merit pay has recently gotten a lot of press, and in a nutshell here's my view on pay and unions: (1) if it weren't for unions, average teacher pay would be lower, attracting, as a whole, less well qualified candidates (due to a higher degree of risk and cost associated with the profession). At the same time,  (2) so called "merit pay," which unions currently oppose, could definitely make a big difference in the field of education by increasing the reward for hard work and effectiveness. In essence, unions have both a negative and positive influence on one of the most important incentives--pay--for teachers. What then should be done? In my view, we should look very closely at what Washington DC attempted this year, in which teachers had the ability to vote to be on a salary scale or a merit pay system. This compromise could be the best solution yet considered.

The role of unions in education goes beyond accountability and incentives. In two early 2011 posts, I will look at other aspects of the union factor in education, in particular:

-support for teachers
-flexibility with school day, structure and management approaches
-areas of education relatively unaffected by unions
-Overall value of unions

Happy New Year!

Finally, a book I'd recommend looking at that considers many of these questions in the context of higher education: