6 ms·

Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure?

jtbigwoo 16y ago
>Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure? I took a HR/labor management course in college. The professor summed up labor negotiations like this: "You get the union you deserve." If management views the union as an adversary, the union becomes an adversary. If management takes every opportunity to break the union, the union takes every opportunity to further entrench itself. The best way to make a union a partner in improving education is to actually engage them in improving education. Instead we seem to mostly get political grandstanding and trolling.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I've noticed that to some extent among grad students, though that's a weird variety of union. But the most militant, adversarial grad-student unions tend to be paired with the most dysfunctional, adversarial administrations (not sure which came first). I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like). One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things. The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.
Anechoic 16y ago
As has been pointed out before, if teachers unions are the problem, one would expect that states without collective bargaining requirements would outperform states with those requirements. They don't: http://shankerblog.org/?p=895 http://shankerblog.org/?p=895
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Sample is massively skewed - southern poor states. Other variables absolutely wash out "collective bargaining" as an important factor.
  - Anechoic 16y ago
    From the article: "Now, some may object to this conclusion. They might argue that I can’t possibly say that teacher contracts alone caused the higher scores in these states. That there are dozens of other factors besides contracts that influence achievement, such as lack of resources, income, parents’ education, and curriculum, and that these factors are at least partially responsible for the lower scores in the ten non-contract states." "My response: Exactly." There was also a followup: http://shankerblog.org/?p=980 http://shankerblog.org/?p=980
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
namdnay 16y ago
Lots of European countries have very powerful teachers' unions and tenure (off the top of my head France, Germany, Sweden, Norway). Yet their results (for secondary education of course) are far better than NYC. So I doubt that's the major cause.
- anamax 16y ago
  > Lots of European countries have very powerful teachers' unions and tenure (off the top of my head France, Germany, Sweden, Norway). It's easy to do things in those monocultures. Heck, look at the "scandanavian" states in the US - they work even better. The US as a whole, for better or worse, is far more diverse. (And segregated.)

>Not to be OCD or anything, but isn't it time to break the teachers unions and eliminate tenure? I took a HR/labor management course in college. The professor summed up labor negotiations like this: "You get the union you deserve." If management views the union as an adversary, the union becomes an adversary. If management takes every opportunity to break the union, the union takes every opportunity to further entrench itself. The best way to make a union a partner in improving education is to actually engage them in improving education. Instead we seem to mostly get political grandstanding and trolling.

_delirium 16y ago
I've noticed that to some extent among grad students, though that's a weird variety of union. But the most militant, adversarial grad-student unions tend to be paired with the most dysfunctional, adversarial administrations (not sure which came first). I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like). One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things. The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.

Anechoic 16y ago

As has been pointed out before, if teachers unions are the problem, one would expect that states without collective bargaining requirements would outperform states with those requirements. They don't: http://shankerblog.org/?p=895 http://shankerblog.org/?p=895

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Sample is massively skewed - southern poor states. Other variables absolutely wash out "collective bargaining" as an important factor.
- Anechoic 16y ago
  From the article: "Now, some may object to this conclusion. They might argue that I can’t possibly say that teacher contracts alone caused the higher scores in these states. That there are dozens of other factors besides contracts that influence achievement, such as lack of resources, income, parents’ education, and curriculum, and that these factors are at least partially responsible for the lower scores in the ten non-contract states." "My response: Exactly." There was also a followup: http://shankerblog.org/?p=980 http://shankerblog.org/?p=980
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

namdnay 16y ago

Lots of European countries have very powerful teachers' unions and tenure (off the top of my head France, Germany, Sweden, Norway). Yet their results (for secondary education of course) are far better than NYC. So I doubt that's the major cause.

anamax 16y ago
> Lots of European countries have very powerful teachers' unions and tenure (off the top of my head France, Germany, Sweden, Norway). It's easy to do things in those monocultures. Heck, look at the "scandanavian" states in the US - they work even better. The US as a whole, for better or worse, is far more diverse. (And segregated.)