Under fire
Once nearly untouchable, teachers unions now are being portrayed as barriers to school reform. How are school boards responding?
By:
Del Stover
Published: June 21, 2011
Two years ago, it would have been unthinkable for New Jersey’s governor to pick a bare-knuckle fight with the state’s powerful teachers unions. Why risk a confrontation with the unions’ well-funded war chest, get-out-the-vote political machinery, and considerable influence with the state legislature?
But then came Republican Chris Christie.
With a blunt, no nonsense approach, Christie has picked any number of fights with the unions since his election last year. He’s butted heads with them on everything from tenure reform to pay freezes, and from layoffs to the need for teachers to contribute more to health and pension plans.
And he’s pulled no punches in voicing his opinion. In one speech, he claimed New Jersey’s school reform efforts are being held hostage by “a selfish, self-interested, greedy union that cares more about putting money in their pockets and the pockets of their members than they care about educating our most vulnerable and needy children.”
Those are harsh words, but what’s notable isn’t that Christie said them. It’s the number of people who are joining him in his rhetoric. Legislators in at least three states—Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—filed bills in February to eliminate or seriously weaken the collective bargaining rights of public sector employees. At press time, Idaho and Tennessee were likely to consider similar measures.
Those moves occurred after Republicans took control of a number of state legislatures following last fall’s elections, but unions have been in the crosshairs of any number of politicians, media pundits and public policy groups for some time. The recent documentary, “Waiting for Superman,” demonized the unions before a national audience. In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a one-time union organizer, has pilloried his city’s teachers union, calling it “one unwavering roadblock to reform.”
Such attacks have put the teachers groups on the defensive, and the anti-union line is forcing the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to reassess their political positions—and the messages they’re delivering. And no wonder: Across the nation, unions confront challenges to long-established policies on tenure, seniority, and teacher evaluations—challenges that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
“The old adage proves true once again: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” NEA President Dennis Van Roekel wrote in an article published on his association’s website in late February. “This isn’t about balancing budgets. It’s about balancing power.”
In many cases, school boards are likely shedding few tears for the unions’ discomfort. Many will be thrilled if lawmakers take advantage of today’s political environment to overhaul tenure rules. Others will rejoice if local school officials gain more flexibility in reassigning or laying off teachers—or if they can explore new teacher evaluation models that take into account student performance.
And there are signs that these things are happening. A two-day labor-management conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and numerous education groups, including both teachers unions and the National School Boards Association (NSBA), brought leaders from 150 school districts to Denver last month. The event showcased ways that union leaders, administrators, and school boards are “working together to focus on student success.”
The question is: Will these efforts work, or will things stay the same?
Changing world
Clearly these aren’t the best of times for the NEA and the AFT.
Even the traditional alliance between the unions and the Democratic Party is fraying. Despite union support for Democratic candidates to the tune of millions of dollars in the 2008 elections, the Obama administration and leading Democrats in Congress are endorsing reform ideas in the face of union opposition. Using $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants as an incentive, the White House has encouraged state leaders to expand charter schools, link teacher pay to student test scores, weaken tenure, and accept turnaround plans that include the option to dismiss a school’s entire instructional staff.
What’s unclear, however, is whether unions are simply undergoing a rough patch—or whether what we’re seeing is a shift in the balance of power in education policymaking. Although the unions—with their combined 4.6 million members—will remain a powerful voice in education, it’s possible that their political clout is being tested by the increasingly influential role of other special interest groups.
“[Teachers unions] are under a lot of heat right now,” says Terry Moe, a professor of political science at Stanford University and author of a new book, “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.”
This isn’t the first time unions have come under political pressure. Every decade has seen some period where school reformers have vilified the unions or, at the very least, pushed for reforms in state policies or in contract provisions that the unions have fought so hard to establish. What’s different this time around is that the criticism seems more broad-based.
What’s happening? Several factors appear to be at work. One is a changing political environment. Despite much public debate over education issues, most policy decisions in past years ultimately were decided by an inner cadre of the education community—lawmakers, regulators, and representatives of various education groups, of which the unions were among the most powerful. But that’s changing. The Internet has expanded the reach of policy debates. Think tanks and philanthropic groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Eli Broad Foundation, are pouring millions into research and high-profile projects seeking to influence education policy.
Meanwhile, the charter school movement has evolved into a politically powerful special interest group that includes both wealthy business leaders and a growing and influential constituency of parents.
Today’s economic woes also have put unions on the defensive.
Given concerns about unemployment and state budget deficits, there is little sympathy for the union’s efforts to protect teachers’ jobs, salaries, and benefits. In recent years, as United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) resisted layoffs to close serious budget deficits in the nation’s second-largest school district, critics charged the union was putting teachers’ jobs ahead of students’ needs. In New Jersey, which confronted a multibillion-dollar deficit last year, Christie publicly eviscerated the unions for refusing to make concessions on wages and benefits.
“In a time when everyone in this economy is suffering, when we’ve had people in the private sector who have been out of work for years ... I asked teachers across the state of New Jersey to take a one-year pay freeze and to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries towards their health benefits, for those who didn’t contribute already,” Christie said. “The teachers union response was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of the state.”
In a society that relies increasingly on 10-second sound bites for news, such criticism—accurate or not—is hard to refute. Of course, given the complex issues in education, there was some logic to the unions’ stance. But union leaders had a difficult time articulating that stand—and few were willing to listen. Thus the cacophony of anti-union messages took root: Tenure allows bad teachers to stay in schools. Merit pay inspires teachers to work harder. Unions obstruct school reform. Unions put jobs ahead of kids.
To some degree, such attacks have taken on a life of their own, with unions becoming a kind of bogeyman among some groups. Last year, when education groups, including the unions, opposed provisions of a new school choice bill in California, the legislation’s proponents and some in the media quickly labeled such efforts “union protectionism,” says Rick Pratt, assistant executive director for governmental relations with the California School Boards Association (CSBA).
“It was just stirring the fire,” he says. “None of it was really true. A lot of people who were watching up close saw an effort at real reform, with real concessions on everybody’s part. But the media had this anti-union sentiment.”
The bill eventually was passed and signed into law.
What does it all mean?
For school boards, such a changing political environment could change the dynamics of education policymaking. And signs of change already are all around. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers are taking the lead in producing “Common Core State Standards,” supplanting some of the traditional state-level dialogue that would have involved school boards and unions.
In California, the charter school industry’s lobbying efforts are reshaping education policy at the local level. In Los Angeles, for example, nearly 70,000 students now attend charter schools, and lobbying by the charter school community and parents convinced the city school board last year to adopt an initiative allowing charter organizers and other groups to take over new and “failing” schools.
“It’s a different playing field,” says Los Angeles school board member Steve Zimmer. “It’s not like it’s the union versus the school board. It’s the union versus the school board versus the mayor versus the charter community. It’s complicated.”
Against this backdrop, it’s worth noting that unions have done good service to school boards over the years. In California and across the nation, it often was the unions’ immense financial resources that helped defeat well-funded ballot initiatives to launch statewide voucher programs, implement arbitrary mandates that schools spend 65 percent of their budgets in the classroom, and adopt tax cuts or caps that would have eroded future state education funding.
“We have a long history of working together [with the unions], primarily on funding and budget issues,” says CSBA’s Pratt. “We don’t always agree on policy issues ... but we work together when it comes to fighting off proposed budget cuts or a voucher initiative. The big money comes from the teachers and classified employee unions.”
That positive influence does not, of course, excuse the unions’ stubborn opposition to change when reform clearly is needed. Consider tenure: It’s one thing for a union to protect the due process rights of its members; it’s another to defend costly, byzantine rules that discourage school districts from terminating bad teachers. Today, some estimates suggest it costs $50,000 to $200,000 to fire a tenured teacher. No wonder that, as New York’s Daily News reports, only 88 out of the city’s approximately 80,000 teachers were dismissed for poor performance between 2007 and 2010.
Union leaders rightly point out that school boards and administrators share part of the blame for such statistics. Studies show that teacher evaluations are haphazard and poorly documented, and legitimate questions arise when a teacher is the target of firing after receiving satisfactory ratings for years. School officials also shoulder blame for routinely awarding tenure without regard to teacher performance.
“I don’t like bad unions any more than anyone else,” says Adam Urbanski, president of New York’s Rochester Teachers Association. “But I don’t like bad management, either. And I don’t like that there’s so much stereotyping and scapegoating.”
Facing change
Certainly some allegations made against unions are oversimplified. If collective bargaining was that harmful to student achievement, wouldn’t largely union-free charter schools be more successful with student performance? And if unions are such an obstacle to reform, asks Paul Toner, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, why do students in his union-friendly state outperform much of the nation, including Southern states with weaker union influence?
Such arguments are relevant. But they won’t rehabilitate the unions’ image as long as they’re viewed as defending bad teachers and resisting financial concessions in these troubled economic times. The dilemma for the unions is how to address the criticisms aimed against them without appearing defensive or obstructionist.
Urbanski, who heads an organization of reform-minded leaders called the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), says unions cannot defend themselves simply by pointing out the flaws in these attacks or questioning their critics’ motives.
“We need to make more thoughtful and compelling recommendations than what are being offered, and we need to move forward through collaborations,” he says. “We need to be clearer about what we stand for. Eventually cooler heads and reason will prevail, but only if the public is presented with preferred alternatives. Much of the support for extreme or untenable positions is that they’re ground in the logic that at least they’re proposing something.”
Some union leaders accept this logic. But the willingness to embrace serious reform varies widely across the different locals, state affiliates, and national union organizations. AFT Colorado supported state legislation last year that reformed teacher tenure and tied teacher evaluations to student performance. But the larger Colorado Education Association opposed the measure with a big public relations campaign and strong lobbying push in the legislature.
More recently, New Jersey union leaders have offered up ideas on revising tenure rules, although some observers see minor concessions in the proposals. Talk on tenure reform also has popped up in Michigan, although major reform will be hard for unions to swallow, says Tom White, associate director of labor relations for the Michigan Association of School Boards.
“My experience is that unions historically have been resistant to change,” he says. “I think they’re very hesitant ... when you look for ways we can be more efficient, the answer they come up with tends to be smaller class sizes, more teacher pay, more teacher development.”
Uncertain future
It’s impossible to predict what the future holds—other than to anticipate that the debate over teacher tenure, seniority, teacher evaluations, merit pay, and other issues will continue to wage in the years ahead. But certainly some progress will be made. At the local level, school boards in Baltimore, Memphis, New Haven, Conn., and Washington, D.C., have reached agreements with their unions to make important changes on some of these issues.
Not that these negotiations were easy. It took 2 1/2 years and the personal intervention of AFT’s national president, Randi Weingarten, to reach agreement on a new teachers’ contract in D.C. that made it easier to remove bad teachers and created a voluntary performance pay program that offered a big pay boost in exchange for an evaluation process that took into account student performance.
Still, some union leaders recognize that accommodations are needed amidst calls for a change to the status quo.
“It’s obviously best if we’re working together with school officials,” says Paul Georges, president of the United Teachers of Lowell and vice president of AFT Massachusetts. “There are areas where we agree closely, and other areas where we disagree.
But we can’t allow that to interfere with the bigger work, which is educating kids.”
One welcome step in that direction was the February labor-management conference, which was an attempt to ease the finger pointing and underscore the need for more collaboration and less divisiveness on the issues. Yet, no one is expecting the volume or the tone of debate to change overnight.
Earlier this year, the United Teachers of America went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to block New York City’s release of teacher evaluation reports that ranked thousands of city teachers based on what the union called a flawed use of student test scores. In Los Angeles, the UTLA is fighting a court settlement between the Los Angeles school system and the American Civil Liberties Union that will limit the use of seniority in future teacher layoff decisions.
Tough battles also lie ahead in state legislatures, where significant changes are sought in the rules governing teachers. Observers such as Frank Belluscio of the New Jersey School Boards Association predict: “The unions will fall on the sword for tenure.”
But that’s to be expected. The unions still wield immense political clout, and their existence is predicated on their duty to protect the interests of their members. Even the union’s biggest critics understand that—and some warn that the unions will only concede so much.
"The teachers unions are by far the most powerful force in American education,” Stanford’s Moe says. “And major reforms are not in their interests.”
Del Stover ( dstover@nsba.org ) is a senior editor of American School Board Journal.
Reprinted with permission from American School Board Journal, April 2011. Copyright 2011 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved.