Case Studies: Overview | CEC | MITUL
The challenge of educating all students to unprecedented high levels of achievement means changing the work of teaching and changing the school as a workplace. It also means changing the way unions represent teachers and the way that teachers unions and school districts conduct their business. Above all else, reform requires teachers and administrators to work as partners. This philosophy of “professional unionism” should lay the foundation for any comprehensive reform effort. In a professional model, unions collaborate with school districts to redefine the work of teaching and improve student achievement. To learn more about organizations helping unions develop these practices, refer to the case study pages.
The industrial model of union-management relations, common in many schools, assumes that labor and management are fundamental adversaries, and that collective bargaining is the primary means to resolve conflict. Under the industrial model, teaching is considered a largely uniform type of work, and collective bargaining agreements seek to establish uniform conditions for the teaching workforce.
A recent policy brief found that thirty of the fifty districts studied have labor agreements with poorly defined regulations, fifteen have restrictive or highly restrictive labor agreements, and those with high concentrations of poor and minority students tend to have more limiting contracts. Though the current model has been enormously successful in improving the pay, benefits, working conditions, and job security of teachers, it is clear that these traditional contracts have also drawn a line between labor and management, thus limiting the scope of bargaining.
Among other benefits, a professional model of unionism would expand the scope of bargaining to:
- Provide teachers with equal ownership over the process of change
- Ensure that teachers are offered the support necessary to improve their instructional effectiveness
- Create a more attractive environment in which to work and
- Offer new opportunities for teacher leadership
The following section provides specific recommendations for how a culture of professional unionism could be implemented in districts. For a more detailed discussion of existing practice and possible reform, read the recent research and publications. Additional resources are also available in the websites and tools section.
- Accept change. School district and teacher union leadership need to acknowledge that they have entered into a new era in public education where student performance must be central to decision-making. Now that the goals for student learning have increased substantially, what we expect of teachers and teaching must change as well.
- Promote collaborative labor-management relations. Together, labor and management need to foster a workplace culture where improving student performance is at the heart of school improvement efforts. This goal will require a collaborative partnership between a reform-minded administration and progressive union leadership.
- Ensure quality and organize around professional issues. If our public schools are going to advance, unions must take the lead in improving the quality of education. Unions must collaborate with school districts to create standards for educator performance and ensure that their members excel in increasing student learning. In so doing, unions should explore new forms of collective bargaining that are more reform-oriented. For an example of how unions have taken ownership over monitoring the profession, refer to the Peer Assistance and Review page.
- Empower teachers. If reforms are to be sustained, then teachers must be empowered to assume an expanded role in policy development and implementation. Teachers and their unions must be at the vanguard of educational improvement, and reforms should be done done with teachers and the community and not done to them.
To see how specific organizations are training union leaders to implement these recommendations, refer to the case study pages.
- The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts
(Frederick M. Hess and Coby Loup, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008)
To improve the state of collective bargaining, Hess and Loup recommend that (1) policy makers, scholars, and reformers promote transparency, (2) superintendents and school boards negotiate more leader-friendly agreements, (3) reformers pay attention to how contract language impacts practice, (4) superintendents push principals to lead more aggressively, and (5) advocates and policy makers work with the national teachers’ organizations to promote more flexible agreements. - Waiting to Be Won Over: Results From a National Survey of Public School Teachers
(Ann Duffett, presented at the Education Sector Event: “Teacher Voice: How Teachers See the Teacher Quality Debate,” Washington, DC, May 7, 2008)
Teachers were more likely in 2008 than they were in 2003 to say unions were essential, and the jump among new teachers who had been teaching less than five years was especially striking. There has also been a corresponding shift in the perception of the role of unions. More teachers now support the union taking an active role in improving teacher evaluation, supporting and mentoring teachers, guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession, and negotiating new and differentiated roles for teachers. - Resource Allocation in Traditional and Reform-Oriented Collective Bargaining Agreements
(Julia E. Koppich, School Finance Redesign Project, Center on Reinventing Public Education, May 25, 2007)
In this report, Julia Koppich provides several concrete examples of what professional unionism looks like in practice, by highlighting districts such as Minneapolis, Toledo, Rochester, Columbus, Denver, and Montgomery County, MD. Some of the practices discussed include career development, differentiated pay, new teacher induction, professional development, and standards-based evaluation processes such as peer assistance and review. These contracts promote collaborative relations, focus on building capacity, allow for flexibility, protect the profession rather than individual teachers, and explicitly reference student performance. - Collective Bargaining in Education and Pay for Performance
(Jane Hannaway and Andrew J. Rotherham, prepared for Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education Conference, Nashville, TN, February 29, 2008)
In this report, the National Center on Performance Incentives examines the emerging policy focus on teacher performance incentives and the response of the teachers unions in five programs – Denver’s ProComp, a pilot program in New York City, the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), Toledo’s TRACS, and Minnesota’s Q-Comp. The authors conclude that teachers unions exert enormous influence and, without union involvement, reform is unlikely to be sustained. Page 16 provides a comparison of how different districts have involved unions in the process of design and implementation, through both the level of participation and the structure of incentives. - Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining: Why Key Issues Are Not Addressed
(Emily Cohen, Kate Walsh and RiShawn Biddle, National Council on Teacher Quality, July 2008)
This brief discusses the important role that states play in collective bargaining agreements. Though the union is important, it is not the monolithic authority many believe it to be. State law still typically dictates a considerable number of teaching related provisions – such as evaluation, tenure, pay, class size, and benefits. Cohen, Wash, and Biddle discuss the way in which state law, state regulations, local teacher contracts and local school board policies work together to determine how the teaching profession is governed. - Leading the Local: Teachers Union Presidents Speak on Change, Challenges
(Susan Moore Johnson, et al., Education Sector Reports, June 2007)
In this Education Sector report, the authors interview presidents of 30 local unions in six states who have been elected to their posts within the past eight years. Most believe that certain reform policies, such as differentiating teacher compensation, are important and have adopted some form of hybrid bargaining, which combines adversarial and interest-based bargaining.
The following websites contain additional ideas and information about professional unionism. The organizations highlighted have produced additional research and provide examples of professional unionism in practice.
- The TR3 project out of the National Council on Teacher Quality provides access to collective bargaining agreements from across the country. The online interface compares district and state policies, and the provisions highlighted represent an extensive range of topics including benefits, school calendar, class sizes, salary and differential pay, evaluation, grievances, leave, professional development, working conditions, employment termination procedures, and union membership. The TR3 database provides the following information for 100 districts across the country – scope of bargaining, union contract, salary schedule, evaluation handbook, benefits information, and also discusses the collective bargaining policies for all 50 states. Several groups of researchers used information from this database to conduct original research on collective bargaining rules and regulations. For a complete list of the finalist papers, click here.
- The Teacher Union Reform Network is a union-led effort that aims to restructure the nation's teachers unions to promote reforms that will improve student learning. The primary goal of TURN is to develop models of new unionism that will transform teachers unions into agents of reform that professionalize teaching and create a culture of achievement in school districts across the country.
- The Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership (MITUL) aims to develop the leadership skills and organizational capacity of emerging progressive teacher unionists. MITUL’s mission is to help prepare next-generation union leaders to employ a progressive vision of the role of the teachers union in advocating for and implementing change. In January 2005, nine urban locals were invited to be part of the first cohort of leaders. See the MITUL case study page for more information.
- The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) believes that reform must happen with schools and the people who work in them and cannot be imposed on them from the top down. To improve the chance of sustaining change, the organization has created the AFT Innovation Fund to support successful local educator- and union-led reform efforts in public schools across the United States. The goal is for early-impact projects to be operating in schools by September 2009, and the primary group of first-wave projects will begin in the 2010-11 school year. For more information on priorities and the application process, click here.
- United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society
(Charles Taylor Kerchner, Julia E. Koppich, and Joseph G. Weeres, Jossey-Bass, 1997)
This new model of teacher unionism is organized around issues of quality teaching and professional development, as well as economic fairness. The authors propose strategies for expanding the influence of unions by involving them in setting educational standards, evaluating teacher performance, and promoting career security. - Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today’s Schools
(Jane Hannaway and Andrew J. Rotherham, eds., Harvard Education Press, 2006)
Collective bargaining shapes the way public schools are organized, financed, staffed, and operated. Understanding collective bargaining in education and its impact on the day-to-day life of schools is critical to designing and implementing reforms that will successfully raise student achievement. This timely and comprehensive volume offers a thorough and nuanced analysis of the available research and varied perspectives on its implications. - Teacher Unions and Education Policy, Volume 3: Retrenchment or Reform?
(Ronald D. Henderson, Wayne Urban, and Paul Wolman, eds., JAI Press, 2004)
The American public has increasingly heard that teachers unions and quality education are contradictory terms and that unions are responsible for the failure of public schools. This book provides a far more positive perspective on the achievements and value of teachers unions and our public education system. It does not avoid critical examination of the teachers unions. Moreover, taken as a whole, it speaks to the need for continuing reform and renovation within the unions themselves, and it affirms a need for innovation and competition within public education as a way of enhancing its quality.