Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > May > 31 > Entry
The (overblown?) power of teachers’ unions
This week’s Carnival of Education is being hosted at the Education in Texas blog. (Usually you’ll find it at The Education Wonks blog.)
The carnival includes one of my posts from last week that discussed race, tests and intelligence.
One of the entries in the carnival is from the American Federation of Teachers, which runs a blog about No Child Left Behind. In this post, AFT argues against one of the prime complaints about teachers unions, that the seniority rights in labor contracts create more transfers, making it harder for schools to provide a consistent program year-to-year.
For those that aren’t familiar, seniority rights work like this. When a teacher leaves the district, the job in the school she left is posted for any teacher in the district who wants to apply. Then the applicant with the most years of service is selected from among the applicants. This allows teachers to improve their working conditions by moving to a school where they are more comfortable — perhaps because the new school is closer to their homes or they like the principal, or even if they just feel the new school is a better teaching environment.
Critics say this leads bad schools to get worse and allows good schools to horde the best teachers at the expense of every other school, especially in high-poverty areas where good teachers are needed most.
But is that charge true?
The AFT, which has pretty good reputation for the quality of its research, says its study shows districts with labor contracts have fewer transfers. Here’s a quote from the study:
In high-poverty schools where teachers do not have a collectively bargaining agreement, the transfer rate to another school is 11.3 percent compared to only 7.5 percent when teachers worked under a collectively bargained agreement.
So is this criticism of unions overblown?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: The Carnival of Education, Urban School Issues
Comments
By John at AFT
June 1, 2006 11:39 AM | Link to this
When a teacher leaves the district, the job in the school she left is posted for any teacher in the district who wants to apply. Then the applicant with the most years of service is selected from among the applicants. That’s an extreme take on senior rights. A study by the New Teacher Project was so biased and poorly researched that it caused one AFT leader to quit its board. But even that study noted that contract language in some districts gave senior teachers only the right to interview for open jobs. We’ll try to put up something on our blog site or the AFT site that will provide more information about what contracts say about seniority, teacher transfers and teacher hiring.By Oldprof
June 1, 2006 8:54 AM | Link to this
Yes. Along with the other criticisms of faculty protections. For example, “tenured professors don’t work as hard” (false: tenured professors publish more research and advise more students than non-tenured). “Administrators can’t fire bad teachers” (teachers can be fired FOR NO REASON prior to tenure, and then with documented reason afterwards). If you want to see what happens in the absence of job protection, look up any of the cases of good educators who lost their jobs due to vicious unsubstantiated rumors: Google “Eboni Wilson” for starters.By Mary
June 1, 2006 8:39 AM | Link to this
Where is the discussion of student and academic needs and teacher qualifications. So if a math, science or foreign language teacher resigns, a senior English, social studies or PE teacher can get the slot? What about all the coaching tranfers between districts? Do coaches also get favored treatment for the academic slots? Does coaching ability trump academic qualifications? These are the real world issues I have noticed.