Teachers Unions and Education Productivity Functions - Essay Example

?Teachers Unions and Education Productivity Functions [ID Teachers' unions have come under attack in recent years in the West (Kahlenberg, 2010; Campbell, 2010). Right-wing social critics like David Horowitz, and increasingly liberals and moderate progressives, view teachers' unions as problematic: They think teachers' unions inflate wages, protect bad teachers, push for tenure too early, lead to rent-seeking behavior, and oppose important policy changes (Kahlenberg, 2010). And yet, their claim flies in the face of the fact that, in America, teachers are underpaid (Heller, 2005; Moulthrop, Calegari and Eggers, 2005; Martindale, 2009). It is true that teachers often get government benefits and only work nine months out of the year. But even when taking this into account, “[N]ot only are America's teachers grossly underpaid, but that teaching is simply not a sustainable profession it its current form...teachers routinely work 10-12 hour days that don't end when the dismissal bell rings...46 percent of teachers leave within their first five years. Such high turnover and instability undoubtedly wreaks havoc on public schools and their respective communities, in which teachers play a vital role” (Heller, 2005). Compared to their professional cohort, people with undergraduate degrees who underwent additional certification, teachers are colossally underpaid, and teaching is a more obviously stressful and demanding job than other jobs in the cohort; one study found that even after taking into account benefits, teachers were paid 12% less than other professionals (Martindale, 2009). Conservatives argue that it is only good teachers who are underpaid, but this argument is bizarre. The very reason that many schools are turning to underqualified teachers, using substitute teachers increasingly, and relaxing standards is because teacher pay doesn't attract qualified professionals: The market has spoken, and it has denied conservative claims that teachers are overpaid (Moore,. Bearing this in mind, microeconomic analysis makes one thing clear: Teachers' unions, despite risks of rent-seeking behavior, do not lead to net micro-economic loss, and are net-beneficial for the economy. This research only extends to union organization for the sake of collective bargaining (i.e. increasing job satisfaction) and does not address union organization as a national, political interest group. It is possible that teachers' unions might push for negative reforms or have a negative impact on the political system. This paper also attempts to avoid discussing wholly subjective issues of the value of education: Instead, microeconomic analysis conducted hopes to demonstrate that teachers' unions do not cause teachers' pay to spiral out of control compared to others in their professional cohort. Admittedly, an analysis of the effects of collective bargaining on known determinants of student achievement (i.e. teacher time) as well as the education production rate (namely, high school graduation rates) is only a preliminary step in determining the overall effect of collective bargaining on student achievement and teacher productivity. The assessment of teacher pay above ignores yet other factors. First: Not all teachers are paid identically. Since schools are funded by property taxes, there can be substantial variation in pay and school quality. Some areas, like the Glenbrooks in Chicago, have such high incomes in the community that the school resembles a private school. Inner city schools, on the other hand, struggle with poorly paid teachers, inadequate resources, etc. (Wise, 2005; Moore, 2000). The reason is simple: State spending went down, so communities were left to fend for themselves. Where did the money go? Prison. “40 percent of the U.S. prison population is functionally illiterate... From 1980 to 2000, states' expenditures on education went up 32 percent. In that same period of time, states' spending on prisons went up 189 percent” (Moore, 2000, pg. 198). Any analysis of the pay of teachers' unions will have to take into account this variation. Conservative arguments that teachers are overpaid rarely take into account inner-city teachers, and indeed, conservative arguments typically concede that inner city schools are failing and underfunded! Second: As noted, it is difficult to quantify the amount of time teachers spend that is not paid. Many teachers are working before and after the bell, which makes their work more like 12 hours a day. But others work at home, grading and doing lesson plans. What is fairly clear is that teachers' paid working time almost never includes or properly accounts for grading, construction of lesson plans, some forms of professional development and training (though others are remunerated), attending PTA meetings or other forms of community outreach, many types of communication with parents and students, doing work as coaches, etc. Third: While the summer vacation should be taken into account, a way of seeing if teacher pay was below, equal to or above what is appropriate would be to see if teachers were working jobs during the summer. Most do (Heller, 2005; Moulthrop, Calegari and Eggers, 2005). And some are actually taking two jobs even during the school year (Heller, 2005)! “20 percent of public school teachers have to take a second job because they want to continue teaching at all costs” (Heller, 2005; Moulthrop, Calegari and Eggers, 2005). Fourth: Teachers often have to pay for their own supplies, which is problematic if schools are failing and thus their supplies have to be quite extensive (Heller, 2005; Moulthrop, Calegari and Eggers, 2005; Kloberdanz, 2010). Teachers are buying whiteboards, art supplies, pens and pencils, etc. Some teachers are going to swap meets or trading with other teachers; others have gone to businesses or doctors' offices for pens with logos. Teachers have had to buy maps to function both as blinds and as a map for educatinal purpose (Kloberdanxz, 2010). Many teachers are also buying cleaning and repair supplies, doing janitorial and repair tasks for furniture and for the classroom, further expanding their actual job definition beyond what is paid and hired for and raising their costs. Conservatives do not take this account when assessing wages either. Another sign that teacher pay and school funding is below what is desired from the community is the preponderance of bake sales and other private charity efforts to improve schools (Kloberdanz, 2010). If schools and teacher pay were sufficient, the community would not have to be coordinating private charity efforts to compensate. To be fair, current microeconomic theory does make it very difficult to analyze teachers' pay (Podgursky, 2005). When taking into account the variation in terms of unpaid teaching time (which could vary and is impossible to verify or define easily), variation across school districts, and so on, it is hard to make the issue clear (Podgursky, 2005; Martindale, 2009). But conservatives clearly cannot make the claim that teachers are overpaid. Teacher pay is clearly below what is expected from the job when taking into account unpaid support functions. This partially scuttles conservative arguments, but not entirely. Teacher unions could still be contributing to the problem, or otherwise be harming education by protecting bad teachers, pushing for tenure too early, or other factors. But the micro-economic evidence simply does not support this assertion. A tentative, bootstrap meta-analysis of many studies has shown that there is a positive, significant correlation “between unions and productivity in the U.S. manufacturing and education sectors” (Doucouliagos and Laroche, 2004). This analysis shows that, at the least, teacher unions do not reduce productivity in manufacturing and education. Eberts and Stone find, “Holding resources constant and using achievement gains on standardized tests as the measure of output, they find that union districts are seven percent more productive for average students. For the minority of students who are significantly above or below average, however, nonunion districts are more productive by about the same margin, apparently because teacher unions reduce the use of specialized instructional techniques. This result is consistent with the view that unions tend to standardize the workplace. Across all students, the average union productivity advantage is three percent” (1987). This conclusion is profound. It indicates that unions for all students raise productivity substantially. At the least, they do not lower it, disproving anti-teacher-union claims to the contrary. Second, for average students, their efficacy is even higher. Isn't the fact that unions don't serve the best students better than average and remedial students a problem? No. First of all, the best students are likely to succeed no matter what occurs. An honors student who has middle-class professional parents scarcely needs to even come to school: The information and edification they are likely to get at home will be enough. It is the students who are average who need to be protected. Even if unions reduced success for the top students, it would be best for net economic gain to expand them. Second, it is conservatives who are pushing for standardization of education! They are pushing No Child Left Behind-style national examinations, standardized testing, uniform judging and standards, etc. It is a supreme irony that conservatives are opposing the institutions that tend to make teaching standards and treatment more standardized and consistent, with less variation. Indeed, this factor is a key argument for unions. Conservatives argue that teachers protect bad teachers, but they also protect good teachers and tend to push up the qualification of teachers. School districts use non-credentialed teachers as scabs to undercut unions. After all, the AMA certainly has the risk of leading to rent-seeking behavior among doctors, yet conservatives do not view this as something to oppose viciously because the cost of rent-seeking behavior is worth the professional improvement unions tend to lead to. Case studies also drive home the point that unions do not necessarily compete with productivity or educational success. “Finland ranks the highest in the world in K-12 math and reading achievement...almost all teachers in the country are unionized” (Kahlenberg, 2010). In fact, America falling behind Europe and Japan and having some of the weakest teaching unions and lowest rates of teacher union membership in the world would seem to single-handedly undermine conservative claims. As we have seen, teacher pay is clearly not excessive and is likely to be below what is appropriate. But an astonishing fact is that public sector pay is higher than private sector pay for teachers (Coulson, 2010). Imagine how low teacher pay would be if it were not for unions. Another way that conservative arguments miss the mark when it comes to discussing unions is that they assume the only effect is through collective bargaining. But Coulson, in an astonishingly pro-union study for the otherwise libertarian Cato Institute, indicates, “Hoxby (1996), as already noted, finds that unions succeed in raising spending in part by shrinking the pupil-staff ratio. The magnitude of the effect, however, is fairly modest, since the spending premium Hoxby credits to the unions ranges from 4.3 to 9 percent above nonunionized districts. Lovenheim (2009), as with wages, finds no net effect of unionization on the pupil-staff ratio. Thus, if the actual union effect falls anywhere within the Lovenheim to Hoxby spectrum, that effect explains only a small fraction of the drop in the pupil/staff ratio of public schools. Once again, the unions have arrived at their goal, but they do not appear to have realized that success chiefly through collective bargaining” (Coulson, 2010). This evidence points to the benefit of unions in three ways. First: Conservative indicators that unions raise spending costs of schools are explained first and foremost by lowering average class sizes! Yet it is conservatives who are taking the public schools to task for obscenely large teacher-to-student ratios that make it impossible for students to effectively learn! The fact that unions' biggest impact on spending is to improve one of the major indicator of educational and pedagogical success might alone be the argument for their existence: They make teaching better, and their “costs” are to improve the school. Second: This indicates that union and teachers interests are not always opposed. Anti-union arguments claim that teachers push for less replacement of teachers which could be harmful to education by preventing bad teachers from being eliminated. This ignores that tenure is also designed to protect communities from politically-motivated firings of controversial but effective teachers and to allow for teachers to improve rather than to be fired, but in any respect, conservative arguments assume that teacher union and community interests are always opposed. But this is not always the case. Lower class sizes are better for teachers because smaller classes are easier to monitor, discipline, and teach, and require less work for grading and logistical support. But they are also better for students. Without taking into account this harmony of interest between teachers' unions and community interests, it is impossible to argue that unions are harmful successfully. Third: Anti-union arguments that claim that unions are ineffective or problematic focus on the collective bargaining alone. But collective bargaining is far from the only way that unions exact change from schools. They also create informal and formal standards, discuss curricula, support professional development, and otherwise change teaching culture and behavior. These factors overwhelmingly do not lead to wage or benefit increases but instead lead to benefits for the school. Conservatives often point to wage compression by teachers' unions as a problem (Coulson, 2010). And it does seem to be true that teachers' unions tend to compress wages. “There is ample evidence that unions in general compress wages, and Victor Lavy (2007: 93) argues that teachers union lobbying in particular "has often halted efforts to legislate performance-based rewards." Derek Neal (2002) notes that public schools have more compressed wage structures than (overwhelmingly non-union) private schools, even when the private schools nominally have similar pay schedules” (Coulson, 2010). But this is actually good for three reasons. First: This proves that unions do not tend to harm new teachers. One claim is that new teachers are kept from good wages by the system of seniority leading to promotions, raise wages, protection from firing, etc. But wage compression indicates the opposite. Second: It is true that there is a rent-seeking cost to the society to higher wages for entry-level teachers. But there is also an improvement in terms of making it so teachers have an incentive to actually join public schools. One of the big problems with teaching education is that many young professionals are not going into teaching even though they are otherwise interested because the entry level wages are bad and they have to go through years of work for tenure and some benefits (Moore, 2000). Avoiding this is a good thing. By raising the opening wages for a beginning teacher, teacher unions encourage young professionals to get into the industry and not into other professional positions such as accounting or real estate that pay more immediately. Third: It is true that wage compression tends to reduce the ability to reward “good” teachers with higher wages. But the problem is that teaching is overwhelmingly subjective. A teacher may fail to have their students prepare for a standardized test adequately because the teacher is developing their critical reasoning or their character. A teacher who appears to be successful on paper could be a bad role model for the communities' values and beliefs. Making teaching wages overwhelmingly dependent on experience and time at the institution encourages teachers to stay around. As we've seen, teachers changing schools is a problem. Teachers are not CEOs or lawyers moving from firm to firm: They become social liaisons, with links and ties to their communities. Students talk about the teacher that they had in a particular grade to their little brothers, to family members, to friends. When a teacher leaves, it harms the schools' permanence and reputation: It truly changes the school and the community. Further, arguments that unions compress wages fly in the face of the fact that private schools with similar wage structures to public schools have very similar compressed wages (Coulson, 2010). Wage compression is mostly a consequence of pay structure and seniority. It is true that collective bargaining and striking can have costs: It can take both administrators and teachers out of the classroom. But this is no reason for teachers to be underpaid: Administrators' power is passive, pushing wages down; to achieve equilibrium, teachers need to be able to push wages up. Further, collective bargaining itself can actually benefit schools. “Bargaining tends to increase the time teachers spend in class preparation, the experience level of teachers, and the teacher-student ratio” (Eberts, 1984). Randi Weingarten points out that, while teachers' unions do have some risks, school success needs to involve teacher leadership, which unions are the best means to provide. “[W]hen you look at the high performing nations, when you look at the high performing states, the notion of teachers having a voice in a collective way, the notion of teachers fighting for equity for kids, the notion of teachers fighting for the tools and conditions that they need, is something that actually, long term, helps in education. Is it inconvenient to management? Yes, it's inconvenient...” (NPR, 2010). Further, administrators are never taken to task by conservatives. What about overpaid school board Presidents? Is their work really necessary? Administrators need to take responsibility for failing schools, not transfer the cost onto teachers. Anti-union arguments pointing to the success of charter and alternate schools fail on two fronts. First, the evidence for their success is limited. “[S]ome of the reforms to which teachers' unions are an impediment, such as nonunionized charter schools, don't seem to be working very well. Superman [an anti-union documentary written by a liberal anti-union advocate] mentions in passing that only one in five charter schools produces "amazing" results, but in fact their track record is even worse than that: According to a large Stanford University study funded by pro-charter school foundations, only 17 percent outperform regular public schools to any degree; 37 percent underperform; and 46 percent have no impact” (Kahlenberg, 2010). Surely charter schools and other types of alternate schooling should be pursued, but the evidence for them being actually substantially better than public schools is minimal. Second: Charter and alternate schools often get to use entrance exams and avoid being a cross-section of schools. The comparison to private schools fail on the same ground: Public schools have to teach to the lowest common denominator; other types of schools don't. Anti-teacher-union advocates try to argue that disparaging teachers' unions is not tantamount to insulting teachers, but the evidence flies in the face of this claim (Moore, 2000; Kahlenberg, 2010). “Polls find that teachers are generally supportive of their unions. For example, a 2003 Public Agenda poll, financed in part by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, found that 81 percent of teachers strongly or somewhat agreed that "without the union, teachers would be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power." Likewise, 81 percent strongly or somewhat agreed that "without collective bargaining, the working conditions and salaries of teachers would be much worse" (Kahlenberg, 2010). It is certainly an issue if union leaders are corrupt or self-serving, and problems do emerge. “There is no doubt that unionism in the U.S. has a checkered history including corruption, conservative politics, and dictatorial control by union bosses. However, democratic struggles within unions have also always been part of unionism. In fact in Chicago the democratic forces have recently been victorious” (Anderson, 2010). Gary Anderson, a Professor of Education with study of the labor movement, concludes that unions have in general in America moved towards more internal democracy and autonomy for members rather than elite leaderships. Conservative claims that teachers' unions are responsible for the decline of education cannot be sustained historically (Peltzman, 1993). Unions certainly have had an impact, but this impact, as we have examined, is complex. But more importantly, there are dozens of other variables. Demographic changes certainly have had an impact. Social issues that Peltzman identifies, such as changes in poverty, crime, geographic distribution of crime, ghettoization, drug use, etc. are major factors (1993). Conservatives never bother to control for all of these factors: They typically control for school and community income but not other community factors, for example. This is especially damning for a simple reason: It is conservatives who are arguing that social changes in terms of values, culture, crime, etc. have major impacts on communities. Abandoning this position to demonize unions is telling and seems to be arbitrary special pleading. One of the main reasons why teachers' unions are so important, and why they are so unpopular with conservatives, is that they are one of the last bulwarks of broad unionization in the country (Cooke, 2010; Anderson, 2010). As Shamus Cooke puts it, “The biggest obstacle towards privatizing public education is the powerful teachers’ unions. Teacher unions are also the strongest segment of the labor movement, and thus the most powerful grouping in the U.S. working class, able to fight back most effectively against corporate school reform— the billionaires’ natural enemies” (2010). This provides another argument for unions' existence. Unless one adopts a philosophy that any union is inefficient or destructive, the fact that teachers' unions protect unions in general and thus help build wages in the current low-wage US and global equilibrium is another argument for their continued protection. While this paper cannot discuss fully issues of political representation and advocacy on the part of unions, it is also the case that conservatives are not accurate when they describe unions as status-quo supporting or against change per se (Kahlenberg, 2010). Unions have pushed for or not opposed many teaching changes. The issue is that unions are often opposing conservative initiatives, not change per se. For example: While teachers' unions oppose punitive efforts to eliminate bad teachers, they do approve of peer review programs, which in Montgomery County in Maryland increased the rate of dismissal or resignation of bad teachers by nearly two hundred-fold (Kahlenberg, 2010). The simple fact is that schools are failing because they're not being funded (Moore, 2000; Kahlenberg, 2010). Other countries in the world have unions and do not have our failing schools. The causality is clear: Unions are not the cause of the problem, and bring many important things to the table. Obama's recent policy is deeply flawed, possibly worse than “No Child Left Behind” (Cooke, July 2010). The administration has taken an anti-public education stance that is inexcusable. Unions do have risks of corruption, protecting bad teachers, rent-seeking and being too political. But the evidence is clear that their benefits outweigh their costs to society, leading to a net gain. Educational reformers need to stop blaming unions and start focusing on issues of funding. Works Cited Anderson, Gary. “Teachers Unions No More: Are We Prepared for the Union-Busters”. Huffington Post. December 19, 2010. Campbell, Duane. “Sacramento Bee Editorials Continue to Attack Teacher Unions in Support of SB 1285”. California Progress Report. July 7, 2010. Web. Retrieved from http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/?q=node/7931 . Accessed 1/3/2011. Cooke, Shamus. “Billonaires Unite! (Against Public Education and Teachers)”. ZNet. October 1, 2010. 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