Teachers Unions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Photo by LaTerrian McIntosh on Unsplash

Welcome to my first newsletter of 2023! I apologize to everyone who was waiting on the edge of their seat to receive one last week; I was in Boston for the New Year and I didn’t have any time to send one out. We are now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

If you have been paying attention to the comments section of my newsletter, you will know that my two biggest commenters are my Uncle Dan and my Grandpa Ron (it’s his birthday today, so be nice). The former agrees with most of my newsletters most of the time; the latter does not. That’s perfectly fine—I welcome differences of opinion—but Grandpa Ron has been goading me into writing about teachers unions for some months now. I figured I would take the bait and write about unions this week.

I have many complicated thoughts on unions, which I will share in the coming paragraphs. Before I start, I should note that I am part of the teacher union that represents public school teachers in my school district. I was initially going to pass on it, but I was convinced by a colleague that I should join in case I needed legal representation. Because I am part of the union, I do hold some favorable views towards teachers’ unions in general. But overall, I am quite skeptical of their value within public schools and public policy. As a result, I am splitting this newsletter into three sections with completely unoriginal names: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Also, a disclaimer: There will be politics involved in this newsletter. It’s simply unavoidable.

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The Good

As I mentioned above, one of the good things about being part of a teacher’s union is that the union will often pay for your legal representation if you are sued by a parent or by the school. In that way, being a member of the union is sort of like an insurance policy: You hope to never have to use it, but you want it in case you need it. While being sued as a teacher is perhaps vanishingly rare, teachers have been sued by parents or coworkers and have had their lives ruined in the process. Especially in an era of increasing sensitivity among students and their parents, it feels good to have the backing of a union just in case you accidentally make an off-color comment or your words are misinterpreted by an enterprising swindler.

In a school like the one I (unfortunately) teach at, students are effectively allowed to run amok. This creates a sometimes dangerous environment, like when the bell rang yesterday and I couldn’t open my door because students were blocking it from the outside. Moreover, students are so disrespectful to teachers that I have come to describe it to others as a hostile work environment. Teachers unions are made up mostly of other teachers, so they know the situation first-hand. This allows them to provide a powerful voice to the administration and push for school safety. As one union proselytizer wrote, “The union is thus necessary as a protection for teachers against the arbitrary exercise of power by heavy-handed administrators.”

This collective voice is often established at our regular union meetings, which occur every other week after our staff meetings. The administrators leave so that we can meet without them, and we usually express similar sentiments to each other about the dismal environment of our school. This fosters a sense of belonging that I’m not sure would be so strong without the union.

Finally, because teachers unions are so powerful, they can fight for better salaries for teachers. Despite calls from nearly everyone that teachers are underpaid, it is the case that public school teachers get paid more than private school teachers, on average. In 2020-21, according to the Washington Post, public school teachers earned $61,600 on average, while private school teachers earned an average of $46,000—although, as one witty commenter suggested, private school teachers often have to deal with only a tiny fraction of the headaches of a public school teacher. Even so, monetary benefits are obviously very important, so it is good that unions are able to bargain for higher wages for their members.

The Bad

Because that bargaining is collective, however—as opposed to individual—teachers are locked into contracts that they had no part in negotiating (unless they are on the negotiating committee). The contract that results from the negotiations is one-size-fits-all, with no room for movement by individual teachers. Therefore, an individual teacher who is good at his job is stuck at the same (or lower) pay scale as a different teacher who is not so good. Last year, for instance, I got paid slightly less than $40,000 a year because I was a new teacher with a measly bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, a colleague of mine who was not a good teacher was getting paid significantly more simply because he had been teaching for a while in another state. Seniority does not always confer higher skills, but a union contract reflects this unreflective way of thinking.

Moreover, even if you opt out of the union, you are bound by the union contract. This is probably the only way that unions keep members: If teachers opted out of the union and negotiated for a higher salary than their union member colleagues, other members would leave and do the same. The union would then be stuck with the teachers who know they are not high-enough quality teachers to negotiate for a higher salary based on their performance. This then strikes me as a necessary survival technique for unions. Still, it seems unfair to me, and it creates all sorts of weird incentives.

For instance, if you are not part of the union, you feel guilty. Because you are benefiting from the union-negotiated contract, you feel like a free rider and you fear that others see you as a leach. As a result, you cough up the $60 a month for union membership, even though you would be getting the same financial benefits without having to spend almost $1,000 a year. I really don’t like this shame that comes with opting out of the union, which is why I opted in to begin with. Everyone is affected by peer pressure to some degree, and the unions exploit this human aversion to being a free rider.

I also fear that unions ensure complacency among teachers. Once you reach a certain experience level, you become almost untouchable by your school district. Therefore, teachers are incentivized to become somewhat lazy once they reach their tenure status. Of course, not all teachers do this; I would be surprised if more than a quarter of teachers slacked off because of their cushy positions. But the incentive to become lazy is certainly there, and it’s built into the contract. Plus, unions are always in a position to enforce the contract as rigidly as they can. This grants little flexibility to administrators who may come up with creative ways of solving a problem. If an administrator takes away one of our two scheduled breaks to cover another class, for instance, we are encouraged to report it to our union representative, who then fights the administrators on our behalf. While it is important for both sides of an agreement to adhere to the text of the contract, I think that unions too rigidly enforce the line.

The Ugly

The relationship between unions and administrators described in the preceding paragraph is one of the worst aspects of unions as I experience it. It creates an adversarial relationship, pitting teachers against administrators. As I see it, however, the real adversarial relationship—at least in a school as bad as the one I teach in—is between the students and the staff. The students really don’t care whether the adult they are swearing at or ignoring or walking into is a teacher, a paraprofessional, a custodian, or an administrator. They just know that the adults are the bad guys, and that we are all part of the system that they are so desperate to rebel against. Therefore, the administrators and teachers should be presenting a united front; otherwise, we are weaker in the face of a daily onslaught.

Okay, this is perhaps a little dramatic. But the sentiment is true. We have to be able to work together to push back against the excesses of our students and the idiocy of the Massachusetts legislators as described in my previous newsletters. And while some administrators are more willing than others to work with the union, there will always be an underlying friction between the two groups. This is a poisonous tension, especially in a school like the one I work in.

But the really ugly parts of unions have to do with their outsized influence on the political process in our country and what they do with that power. Since 1990, the nation’s two largest teachers unions were among the 10 largest contributors to national political campaigns. In some states, unions are consistently the top contributors to political campaigns. This doesn’t mean that unions are buying off politicians and blackmailing them for support for their political priorities. Unions are only going to give money to politicians who already support unions. For instance, a union wouldn’t try to bribe a conservative Republican to turn around and suddenly support all of the union’s policy prescriptions. That would be a waste of money and would only result in scandal for both parties involved.

Still, teachers unions are powerful political players. They reminded the world of their considerable power when in 2020, they consistently opposed reopening schools after the initial shutdowns, even when it became apparent that kids were not learning anything in remote classes. This suggested that the unions were not necessarily in it for the kids—as some may have suspected—but rather to protect their members. Of course, unions are supposed to protect their members. But teachers unions like to claim that everything they do benefits both teachers and students.

This discrepancy between what unions say they are for and what they are actually for is also apparent in their political and policy preferences. Not every policy change benefiting teachers has to come from a progressive or liberal political persuasion. For instance, unions could request cutting down on administrative bloat and decentralize more decision-making power to the school level, rather than the district level. And yet, when large unions talk about politics, it almost always comes from the left.

For instance, in July of 2020—at the very height of the post-George Floyd protests across the country and in the midst of the pandemic—the LA teachers union released a document with demands it wanted met before the school district reopened schools. The demands extended far beyond ensuring teaching safety in the wake of COVID. The demands included, among others, “passing Medicare for All at the federal level, raising state taxes, defunding the police, and imposing a moratorium on charter schools.” I don’t have to point out which side of the political spectrum these demands fit comfortably within.

Finally, unions get in the way of important and necessary changes that could be made to benefit students. As I suggested in previous newsletters, we really need to rethink our educational delivery if we want our country to have anything like a functional school system. But many of these changes would be vociferously opposed by unions. For instance, I think that public schools should basically be disbanded in favor of private schools and students should be given a choice as to where they want to go to school. Unions, however, would staunchly oppose this reform effort.

Indeed, unions have stood steadfastly against such reform efforts in the past. Beginning in the 1980s, a bipartisan school reform effort emerged targeting teacher accountability (i.e., firing teachers who were underperforming) and school choice. But Democratic politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders with backing from teachers unions opposed these efforts, to the point where you can’t find a Democrat within throwing distance of a statehouse who supports such efforts.

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As I say, I have complicated feelings towards unions. On the one hand, they provide benefits to teachers, who deserve protections against their at times insufferable students. On the other hand, they enforce ideological conformity and generally impede necessary reforms to schools. Teachers unions will often say that the only way to reform schools is to provide more funding to failing schools. But there never is “enough” funding. Instead, perhaps we should look at reform efforts that make do with what we have. They should take a page out of Billy Beane’s book and try to Moneyball their way into a winning season.