The effects of teachers unions on American education.

AuthorCoulson, Andrew J.

Public school employee unions are politically partisan and polarizing institutions. Of the National Education Association's $30 million in federal campaign contributions since 1990, 93 percent has gone to Democrats or the Democratic Party. Of the $9.6 million in federal campaign contributions by the American Federation of Teachers, 99 percent has gone to Democrats or the Democratic Party (Center for Responsive Politics 9.009). Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, conservatives and Republicans have often accused these unions of simultaneously raising the cost and lowering the quality of American public schools. Many advocates of charter schools, vouchers, and education tax credits have cited union political influence as the greatest impediment to their chosen reforms. But in academic circles, scholars have sometimes disagreed on the unions" impact on wages and educational productivity. The purpose of the present review is to summarize, and attempt to reconcile, the empirical research on the actual impact teachers unions have on American education.

To give structure to that effort, this article analyses the unions' effectiveness in pursuing five of their key objectives: (1) raising their members' wages, (2) growing their membership, (3) increasing the share of the public school labor force that they represent, (4) precluding pay based on performance or aptitude, and (5) minimizing competition from nonunion shops.

The assertions that public school employee unions seek to grow and to raise their members' wages are entirely uncontroversial. It is also common knowledge that they consistently oppose "school choice" programs that would ease parents' access to competing nonunionized private and charter school alternatives. There could, however, be some question in the reader's mind around union opposition to pay based on performance or aptitude. Public statements by officials have sometimes appeared to leave open the possibility that the unions might accept "merit pay" under certain (usually unspecified) conditions (Sweet 2009).

A closer look at the details of the unions' positions indicates that they remain consistent in opposing pay based on teacher performance or aptitude. NEA Resolution F-8 stipulates that compensation plans for its members should "exclude any form of merit pay except in institutions of higher education where it has been bargained" (NEA 2007). The AFT has no comparable national document that so categorically excludes the possibility of merit pay, but it expressly does not mention performance or aptitude in its list of valid bases for differential salaries (AFT 2003: 29-30). Removing most of the remaining ambiguity, (1) it adds that

While the AFT is encouraging locals to explore various teacher compensation systems based on local conditions, it is not abandoning the traditional [credential- and seniority-based] salary schedule. Failed attempts to implement differentiated pay options, like merit pay systems, identified a few teachers as "outstanding" and paid them extra, rewarding teachers on the basis of supervisory ratings or student test scores. Nevertheless, these schemes have failed [AFT 2003: 32].

In this, U.S. public school employee unions are not alone. According to Victor Lavy (2007), "Teacher unions worldwide strongly oppose performance-based pay. Unions view wage differentiation on the basis of subject taught, as well as any sort of subjective evaluation of teachers, as threats to their collective bargaining strategies and therefore reject them outright." (2)

Have They Succeeded?

To understand the unions' effects on American education, this section reviews their success in achieving the five goals enumerated above.

Wage Increases

There is no doubt that public school teachers' salaries have risen dramatically since the mid-1950s (Figure 1), or that they now greatly exceed the market-determined teacher salaries of the private sector. According to the latest Schools and Staffing Survey published by the National Center for Education Statistics, private school teachers received an average base salary of $38,200 in 2007-08, while the comparable figure for teachers in traditional public schools was $52,100 (Coopersmith 2009: Table 7). This understates the difference in compensation between the sectors, however, due to the superior retirement benefits enjoyed by public sector teachers.

According to Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky (2009), "The employer contribution rate for public K-12 teachers (14.6 percent) was 4.2 points higher than that for private-sector professionals (10.4 percent)," in the most recent quarter for which data are available (the one ending in September 2008). Plugging in these retirement benefit contributions, we have adjusted compensation figures of $59,710 for public school teachers and $42,170 for private school teachers. Public school teachers are thus paid roughly 42 percent more, on average, than their private sector counterparts. (3)

But to what extent can this generous compensation premium be credited to union activity? Figure 1 shows a significant rise in pay over time, but not one that closely follows the historical rise of public school unionization and collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining is the key mechanism by which unions conventionally seek higher wages. The AFT pioneered public school collective bargaining in the style of industrial unions in 1961, through its New York City affiliate, while the NEA followed suit only a decade later. So the most significant period of growth in public school unionization and collective bargaining ha the United States stretched from the mid 1960s through the early 1970s. But a glance at Figure 1 reveals that by the time this period of intensive union action began, teachers' salaries had already been rising rapidly for well over a decade, and real wages actually declined for a solid decade just as unionization was reaching a peak (see Figure 2). Obviously, factors other than unionization were at play, most notably the economic recession of the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, the historical data seem at odds with common assumptions about the unions' impact on teacher salaries, and so we must explore the evidence more closely.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

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