Teachers Unions: Do They Help or Hurt Education Reform?

Transcript

T. Loveless: Today we are presenting two chapters from a book that will be coming out in the next couple of weeks called Conflicting Missions: Teachers Unions and Educational Reform, basically addressing the question of whether teachers unions help to promote or to hinder educational reform. And let me warn everyone again that these are just proof pages, they are galleys, they are uncorrected, and they have tons of errors. So please don't — on the back there's a warning about citing them. Please wait until the real book comes out before you do that. I appreciate it. There are even tables referred to that you will not find.

So, with that warning in mind, let me introduce our distinguished panel that we have here today, and we're pleased to have. First of all, on the far right and one in, Susan Moore Johnson is the Carl H. Phorzheimer Jr. Professor of Education in Learning and Teaching at the Harvard School of Education, where she served as academic dean from 1993 until 1999. A former high school teacher and administrator, Susan earned her EDD degree from Harvard, and is the author of many published articles and books, including a recent article on charter schools, and I love the title, so I want to give it to you, "Sometimes Bureaucracy Has It's Charms: Teachers Experiences in Deregulated Schools," and that's in Teacher's College Record in the current issue, February, 2000.

On the far end, Susan M. Kardos is an advanced doctoral student, administration planning and social policy at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Susan is a former elementary and middle school teacher. She received her AB degree from Brown University in Ethics, and her master's in education from the Harvard Graduate School. She is the recipient of a research training grant from the Spencer Foundation, and is currently involved in a multi-year study on the next generation of U.S. public school teachers.

The Johnson-Kardos chapter is entitled "Reform, Bargaining and Its Promise for School Improvement."

Dale Ballou, who is seated down at this end of the table, is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1989. And although he currently makes a living as an economist, he has served a few stints as a classroom teacher. Dale is the author of several articles in academic journals and, along with his co-author, Michael Podgursky, has written extensively on policies affecting education reform, in particular the role of incentives and regulation in the preparation, recruitment, and retention of teachers. The Ballou-Podgursky chapter to be presented today is called "Gaining Control of Professional Licensing."

Sitting next to Dale is Adam Urbanski. Adam is the president of the Rochester Teachers Association and vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. A native of Poland, he immigrated to the United States in 1960 at the age of 14. He earned a Ph.D. in American social history from the University of Rochester. A former high school teacher and college professor, Dr. Urbanski is one of the nation's most renowned advocates for education reform. In Rochester, he proposed and designed an internship program for new teachers, a peer review intervention plan, a career ladder, a homework hotline service for teachers, and a survey for teachers to evaluate their administrators. Urbanski is a trustee of the National Center for Education and the Economy, a senior associate of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and director of the Teacher Union Reform Network, known as TURN.

Finally, in the middle, Terry Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a professor of political science at Stanford University. His book with John Chubb, Politics, Markets and America's Schools, which happens to be a Brookings publication, is among the most influential and controversial works on education to be published during the last decade. He's also been a major force in the movement for school choice in America, and abroad. In addition to his work in education, Terry has written extensively on public bureaucracy and the presidency, and he is a leading figure in both fields. In addition to his positions at Stanford and Hoover, Terry has served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and he is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

So, with that, we will start with the Johnson-Kardos chapter.

S. Johnson: We have a handout that you don't need to really have at the beginning, but you might want to have to consult later. Thanks very much, Tom. I'm pleased to be here. Susan and I are addressing the question of what role teacher unions and collective bargaining have in relationship to school reform. And, there are two obvious sides to this debate, and they get played out regularly.

One is, the critics of unions who argue that teacher unions are impeding school reform, and that since the introduction of collective bargaining in the late 1960s unions have moved to steadily control public education and to stifle important changes that would make schools more flexible and responsive. The critics regard unions as too powerful, gobbling up the prerogatives of management, and contracts as being too constraining, too negative in their effect. The implicit argument sometimes made explicit, is that management unfettered by the restrictions of collective bargaining can do a much better job, and our schools would be better. And so the conclusion, of course, is that the role of unions in collective bargaining should be reduced or eliminated.

Advocates, on the other hand, believe that the role of unions in collective bargaining in school reform has great promise, and should potentially be enhanced and certainly maintained. They contend that certain progressive unions, Rochester among them, Adam being the president of that one, have themselves advanced the cause of school reform. That the contract in a local district can provide a framework for improvement, and that teachers, along with management, should guide change. So this should be a collaborative effort. Advocates conclude, therefore, that the role of unions and collective bargaining should be maintained and expanded.

In 1998, Susan and I set out to address this question by looking at teacher contracts. I had studied two sets of districts very closely, one group in '79-'80, and another in '84-'85, and they small samples of districts, but chosen to represent the range of districts in the U.S. So what we did is collect all their current contracts and compared them historically to try to see how things had changed over time. And the detail of all of this is in the chapter, and I will spare you the uninteresting details.

But basically we found, first, that although there were predictions that contracts and unions would converge over time so every district would look like every other in the effect of unionism, we found a whole lot of variation, and this is really important, I think, that collective bargaining is a process, and it can lead to very restrictive contracts, or very responsive contracts. It can create a solution to problems, or it can really stifle the opportunities for change.

The second thing we found was that there were notably very few changes in contracts as far as union gains after the mid-'70s. And that's also very notable because I think the public generally believes that unions are progressively stifling change in districts.

So, in addition to those two conclusions about the variation and the lack of union gains since the mid-'70s, we also saw some patterns in the contracts that we looked at. Of the 11, five we call industrial contracts, that were scarcely different from what they had been in the 1970s. And three were of a reform variety. And Susan is going to talk about those two different types.

S. Kardos: We need to put this overhead up here.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 served as a mold for public sector labor laws. Therefore, when teachers won the rights to bargain collectively in the 1960s, the character of labor practices in education was ultimately defined by legislation written with the needs of industry in mind. Industrial bargaining is based on three main principles. The first is that labor and management are adversaries, that their interests are at odds. So that when one wins, the other loses. The second is that standardization and uniformity is desirable, and a third that workers are interchangeable and treated exactly alike.

When educational bargaining began in the '60s, many schools were organized like factories. This factory model emerged from the efficiency movement of the 1920s, and became the standard in most large urban districts. In this model, there's an emphasis on effective management, teachers serve as workers in a production line process delivering uniform education to students. So there is little difference between teachers except in certification and seniority, and little difference class to class or school to school. So imagine students in large classrooms all being taught the same way without any variation.

Industrial bargaining brought contract provisions which ensured much needed professional gains for teachers, such as higher wages, protections against administrative abuse and discrimination, and smaller class sizes. But it also brought professional losses, such as combative deliberation, loss of voice for teachers in schools on how to best use their resources, and placement of teachers in positions based on seniority rather than on teaching qualifications. In some districts, even now, some things are little changed. Seniority is still a powerful determinant of who teaches in what schools, and teachers can only be asked to devote a certain number of minutes to a meeting.

If schools are to provide students with the experience and skills needed to succeed in today's world, teachers must approach their work as a craft or profession rather than as routine labor, and schools must be organized to encourage them to do so.

Some districts responded to the new calls for school reform in the 1980s, and they were inspired towards increased collaboration in labor-management relations, and towards larger scope of labor-management deliberations. Deliberations which were once limited to wages, hours and working conditions now explicitly included education policy. Where school districts and local negotiators dealt with such issues as teachers' roles and responsibilities, professional accountability, curriculum reforms, staff development, and administrative practice, education was finally on center stage.

So reform bargaining, which was based on the principles of collaboration, flexibility and site-based discretion and recognition of varied rules, leads to contract provisions consistent with the reform model of schooling where joint committees are responsible for school governance and programs. Schools have the authority to adapt policies and programs to the needs of their particular school, and teachers have differentiated roles and can serve as peer reviewers, mentors or curriculum specialists.

S. Johnson: So, just to summarize, we're covering a lot of contracting material, we've found variation in contracts where we found a small number of reform contracts that opened the way for better schools by affirming labor and management, that is teachers and administrators commitment to work together, establishing structures that make joint responsibility truly possible, guaranteeing the right of individual schools to maintain their own affairs and to have some differentiation there, and engaging teachers as professionals in the process of educational improvement. In contrast, there were contracts that heightened the distinctions between labor and management, established uniform processes school-wide, specified in very precise terms the rights and obligations of all teachers and administrators. And while the first group clearly was doing things that were consistent with school reform, the second was more likely to inhibit it.

So then the question is what, given these two very different patterns — we saw some contracts in-between that were kind of mixed, but we won't spend time on those today. But given these two directions, the question is, what do we do in thinking about what you recommend about the role of unions. If you're to eliminate or reduce the role of unions and bargaining, one of the problems is that you would eliminate a force and a source of constructive change in many districts. A lot of the reform that's underway is built into organizations, committees, task forces that have been generated out of collective bargaining. Also, you assume that the early reasons that teachers unionized are no longer problems, and the paper that Tom mentioned, Sometimes Bureaucracy Has Its Charms, suggests that teachers in charter schools don't always feel that their needs as workers are being addressed; that, in fact, they can be very, very restrictive as well. It would also assume that administrators really know best about how to make schools work, and I would argue that there's absolutely no evidence that administrators know better how to achieve these things.

Alternatively, we can focus on the possibility of collective bargaining, the best cases, and develop those and encourage those processes. And I think that in the end, I know, that is where we would emphasize the hope in this process, not eliminating bargaining, not reducing it, but only encouraging the kind of practices that really are consistent with reform, embracing a broad range of issues in discussion and bargaining, having both sides acknowledge that they have a shared stake in solving problems collaboratively, keeping individual schools at the center of deliberations so that this about a system of schools, not just a system. And so these principles really, in the context of bargaining, can be very constructive.

Two caveats at the end. One is that an assigned contract, no matter how progressive it looks on paper, is only the beginning. You can have contract language that never is enforced or implemented, and you can have very regressive practices despite that. You also need to move from where you are to where you might want to be, and that requires leadership on all sides and a great deal of trust that takes a long time to develop.

T. Loveless: Dale.

D. Ballou: The research I'm going to talk about the role that teacher unions play in a movement to organize the teaching or the training, the licensure, the accreditation of schools of education along a model similar to that we find in the medical profession. To this audience, I probably don't need to say much about current efforts underway throughout the United States to raise standards for teachers. The particular kind of efforts I'm going to focus on are those that we can describe as following the model on professional self-regulation and, again, the pattern on what you find in the medical profession and other professions where the control of the key institutions that determine who is trained to become a teacher, the kind of training they receive, the accreditation of those institutions, the requirements for teacher licensure, all that is governed by bodies of professionals, not elected officials, but groups of people from the education establishment.

Some organizations have been very active in promoting this vision of reform. We include the National Commission for Teaching and America's Future, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the National Boards of Professional Teaching Standards. Despite the presence of the word "national" in the title of all of these organizations, these are not public organizations in the sense that they're appointed or accountable to the public, or elected officials. They are private bodies composed of educators and professionals.

The teacher unions have been very actively involved in this movement, and each of the organizations I have mentioned today are involved. The governing bodies of these organizations, presidents of the unions are very often found as members of these organizations, they provide financial support to these groups, they promote the activities of these organizations through bargaining. For example, the NEA has promoted the notion that NEA affiliates should seek through bargaining to ensure that districts will only hire teachers who have come from programs accredited by the National Council for Accreditation, and they are active through lobby to promote legislation that would further this particular model of education reform.

Now, the stated goal of all this is to enhance the quality of the teaching workforce. Just putting that question aside for a moment, as an economist, I come to this kind of activity from a different perspective and recognize that a lot of this is just the classic model that we find in many professions and occupations that seek to use control of training and licensure to restrict competition. And there's a long tradition of this kind of activity, it goes back to the guild system of the Middle Ages. Regulations, control of licensing and accreditation of institutions that prepare professionals have long been used as a device to restrict entry to the profession, to reduce the amount of competition found, and to promote, and ultimately to hire.

Now, the proponents of these kinds of reforms see nothing wrong with that. And this is part and parcel of what they think needs to be done. Their view of it is that the country has long paid teachers too little, that it's time we paid them more, and if insisting on high quality and these kinds of standards for teachers is what it takes to get higher pay, so be it, that's fine. And we'll only end up doing what we ought to have been doing all along.

That's one possible outcome, but Mike and I in writing this were concerned about the possibility of other outcomes. And if you'll turn to page 84 of the book, we wrote out a little framework here that shows you what might happen. And there really are two questions. Would reforming professional standards along the professional regulation model, the model of self-regulation, to actually raise teacher quality, so that can be answered yes or no. And then there's a second question, if you went this route, would the reform produce shortages of professionals, would it in fact restrict competition and limit entry, and have those kind of effects, and that could be answered yes or no.

So there's four possible outcomes. You might be, in the upper left-hand corner, where the answer to both questions is yes, and then you'd be in the medical model. We do raise standards, it does lead to a shortage of qualified teachers, salaries have to go up to attract the number of people into the profession that are required.

Then you want to go down to the lower left-hand corner and find that the answers are yes and no. In other words, you will raise professional standards, but you won't actually induce any shortages. You won't need to raise pay. Now, there are some possibilities that that might occur, and you can see some of the things that we list there that might lead to that outcome, although we think that it is somewhat unlikely.

You might end up in the upper right-hand corner of that diagram, where there answers are no and yes, where professional standards fail to raise teacher quality, but you do induce shortages. And there's kind of a lose situation for the public, although it would be beneficial for people in the teaching profession.

And then there's the possibility that the answer to both questions is no, which may be the most likely outcome of all, that education reform simply fails yet again, nothing really changes.

But the thing we're most concerned about in this chapter is the possibility that you're going to end up in that upper right-hand corner, that all these reforms don't actually do much to raise the quality of professionalism, but they do result in shortages, and it does raise incomes for professionals.

Why would we say that we're concerned that this is the likely outcome. Time doesn't allow me to go into all the parts of the argument. I'm going to focus just on the question of accreditation, and the fact that if these kinds of reforms go through, the accreditation of teacher education programs would be in the hands of a body of education professionals, and it would most likely be the National Council of Accreditation for Teacher Education, NCATE.

NCATE standards are very heavy on process, and fairly weak on substance. And just an example of that is, what is it they require of graduates of teacher education? If you're going to earn NCATE accreditation, what are we asking of your graduates? Well, they don't specify that graduates need to demonstrate particular kinds of skills, or achieve a certain level of knowledge of the subject they teach, rather they specify that the institutions are to use a variety of assessment mechanisms to determine whether somebody is well-trained. And it's oriented towards process and not towards a particular standard of achievement.

If there were more substantive content in those standards, although it wouldn't necessarily be better because we can't be that confident that the substance would be of the right kind, there is a very — defining teachers is not a settled matter. There are some fierce controversies at present about just what are the right ways of teaching children, and what are the right thing that teachers ought to be taught to do, and there is no professional consensus based on very solid research of the kind you find in the medical profession that substantiate a particular substantive set of standards. Another thing we find when we look at NCATE is not much in the way of rigorous standards as far as the academic quality of the programs that are being accredited. Programs with extremely low admissions standards are accredited by NCATE. Academic rigor doesn't seem to be very important. Yet, again, if we were to ask the question, would more rigor be a good thing, that's not apparent either because if you take the position that programs with low admissions standards are not to be accredited, you run into a couple of problems.

First, even in the worst programs, there are some pretty good students. You don't want to take the position that those people are to be denied access to the profession or, to put it another way, that public school should not be allowed to consider those kinds of individuals for the jobs that they have open.

Secondly, by closing these kinds of programs, you're going to be excluding people with potential as teachers that maybe do not have high academic achievement, but have compensating virtues. Academic achievement alone does not make an outstanding teacher. And you run the risk that as you move towards more and more rigor, you lose the possibility of considering people who might be fine teachers by virtue of other traits and characteristics they're able to make up for those failures.

The upshot of this discussion is that when you really come down to it, accreditation is a very weak instrument for raising professional standards, because of the nature of teaching and the nature of the profession, the lack of professional consensus based on research about what teaching methods work best, the fact that the standards promulgated by organizations are exceedingly vague and general, and necessarily so because so much of their teaching is very context specific. The fact that teaching draws on multiple skills, only some of which can actually be used to screen applicants, and people interested in the profession, all suggest that it is very hard to come up with a model of accreditation that will, in fact, improve the performance. Yet, considerable harm can be done. And the big thing you hear is that teacher education programs will be closing for many of the wrong reasons.

It's costly to undergo some of these accreditation programs. And I don't mean simply the paperwork and the time involved and going through the accreditation procedure. It's costly in the sense that many programs will have to reconfigure in order to meet the standards. These standards include things like requirements that there be a certain number of full time faculty engaged in research, that the programs have autonomy within the institutions where they're located, meaning a need for more administrators and more support staff. That there be high ratios of faculty to students, that there be an effort to recruit, a vigorous effort to recruit minorities, even in areas where the percentage of the overall population of minorities is quite low.

Programs are very likely to close, not simply because NCATE may deny them their accreditation, but because there's a long process of appeal, and efforts to meet these standards, and programs will simply lose interest. This will be particularly so in liberal arts colleges, none of which produces large numbers of teachers, but as a group are an important source of teachers for the nation.

The reconfiguration of these programs can deter a prospective teacher from entering the profession. Setting up these programs as five year programs, rather than four year programs, or mandating post baccalaureate preparation in lieu of teacher training, raises the entry barrier to the profession, and deters individuals who have other options that they are considering in addition to teaching, and who find that to meet these requirements that open the door to the possibility of becoming a teacher, more and more of the other things they'd like to prepare for are being squeezed out.

And then finally, there's a threat to alternative certification programs. Most of the organizations I listed, and certainly the position of the teacher's union has been fairly hostile to alternative certification programs that would allow interested individuals to enter the profession with a minimum of advanced preparation, and that rely chiefly on on-the-job training. And yet these programs have been in recent years a very important, increasingly important source of supply to many schools.

Finally, I'll close by pointing out, and the alternative certification programs illustrate this, that the push for this is not coming from the bottom. A demand for this kind of professional self-regulation is not coming from K-12 educators, who tell us that we can't hire these kind of people, shut down programs and give us fewer teachers to choose from when we are recruiting. This vision of reform is coming from the top, and it's actually promoted by organizations who have an interest in the supply, whether that's their conscious motivation or not, it certainly is in their professional interest.

A. Urbanski: Good morning. I have the privilege of being the first respondent on both chapters. I have a dilemma because I have ten minutes to do so. So I'll just offer some provocations, and then trust that in the exchange afterwards we can then talk with each other.

This was built as a gathering where there would be strong supporters and ardent critics of teacher unions. And when I read that I had this moment of panic, because I wasn't sure why I was invited, whether I was supposed to be a strong supporter or an ardent critic. I am both. I am a committed unionist, and I am an internal critic, because I believe that unions must change in tandem with out industry, and with changes in our society. So I'm glad to weigh in on these arguments, and, by the way, I want to tell you that I don't fear arguments. As a matter of fact, I think we ought to get more arguments. I think it's very important to argue about important things. It's only unfortunate to argue about petty things.

So let me begin with the most recent comments, that is the most recent speaker, the Ballou and Podgursky chapter, not necessarily my primary area of expertise, but certainly what touches my reality, as well. It takes on the data and questions the intentions. And it offers cautions. I think that these are not bad things to do, frankly. Maybe the data could be stronger, and maybe we should raise questions about agendas and so forth, and offering cautions is always a good idea. So let me offer one of my own, and that is about the methodology and the approach.

Dr. Ballou admits that he is doing this from the perspective of an economist. And I had early in my education an exposure to econometrics. I was a student of history at the University of Rochester at the time when Eugene Chervezi was my professor. But Folker and Engelmann came out with a book called Time On A Cross, essentially the application of econometrics of history, called chronometrics, measuring historical experience with numbers. And in the index of the book Time On A Cross there was not even an entry for that. The euphemism was demographic incident. And the conclusion of the book was that slaves were not that bad off compared to Northern laborers. They took in more calories per day than workers up North, and the issue of clothing was actually more generous than a worker. I fear that measuring for econometrics the experience of students and of teachers, and of real schools, might leave some gaps out of precaution.

Now, I also differ with the conclusions of the chapter, because I am strongly in favor of quality control, with accreditation and education of teachers. As a matter of fact, I harbor the strong suspicion that more than anything else, teacher education, teacher preparation and accreditation is the single most promising lever for improving the quality of education in our schools. Just as the "Flexner Report" triggered quality control within the shoddy occupation that was medicine then and hastened its development into a profession, so I also think would be the case with teaching, or could be the case. Now, NCATE. Maybe there is room for improvement, but if it's a conspiracy, if it's a grand conspiracy, I missed it.

So now to the area that I live every day, and that is teacher unions bargaining reform. I've been trying to do that for nearly 20 years. And I agree with the conclusions of the Johnson and Kardos chapter that of the three alternatives we have, which is to try to eliminate or at least diminish the power of teacher unions, or tolerate the status quo, or put our money on bargaining reform and supporting the more promising impulses within the teacher union movement. The last of these seems to be most promising. I believe this, even though I believe that unions must change no less than schools must change.

As a matter of fact, I think that just as we've inherited the schools that we have, we've also inherited the unions that we have. And that the problem with today's unions, as the problem with today's schools is not that they aren't as good as they once were, but that they are precisely as they always were, and reality is not, and both must change. However, I would suggest that there is no reason to believe that changing unions would prove any less difficult than changing schools. I am in favor of unions that are responsible and responsive to student's needs. I believe that through collective bargaining teachers have the only real way of making policy, of participating in making policy. I believe that contracts offer an opportunity for stability and commitment to the changes that we can, indeed, work out, especially in light of the average tenure of a superintendent in an urban district being about two-and-a-half years.

I believe that harnessing the collective wisdom of teachers through collective bargaining and through unions could be — could be a promising addition to the deliberations about what changes are needed. I believe that contracts should be rethought as far as what they contain. That is, I do think there is some merit in making them thinner, if you will; that is, with some provisions delegated to the schools, or with schools having greater control over their own realities.

I also believe that we should have a different kind of bargaining, that we should not have negotiations every three or four years, after a three or four year interval of festering and neglect, but that we should have ongoing collective bargaining, what some call a living contract, ongoing collective bargaining, problem solving, timely problem solving, relegating most of the issues that now cause wars to long-term settlement through formulas, for example. That salary in Rochester would be X percent over cost of living, or at cost of living, or that it would be in the 65th percentile of the county average, or the state average, or whatever. In other words, there are ways to do this differently. But eliminating collective bargaining would not help to liberate schools to do what they are prohibited from doing. If that were the case, we would see evidence of them doing it in areas where there is no collective bargaining.

So the single most important thing, I think, ought to be to join forces, to continue the search for strengthening public education, for promoting excellence and equity, without viewing them as separate issues. I frankly believe that excellence without equity is not excellence, it is privilege, and that without collective action we run a higher risk of widening the gap, rather than closing it. And to consider a single common denominator litmus test, and that is what contributes towards improving the chances that all students will learn better.

To that end, I think we should expand the scope of collective bargaining to include instruction on professional issues. I think that we should be optimistic. I don't think there is such a thing as leadership that is not optimistic. And I think we should continue to put a premium on harnessing the collective wisdom of teachers in our deliberation on school improvement. I believe this very strongly, and that's why I was instrumental in forming the Teacher Union Reform Network about four years ago, which now includes some of the largest and most progressive affiliates of both NEA and AFT, supported by foundations and the Department of Education. Our goal is to increase the chances that teachers and their unions can become agents of reform. So they would not remain targets of reform and stronger partners to others who want to promote both excellence and equity in our public schools.

Thank you.

T. Moe: All right. I want to get right to the point here. I have only ten minutes. I'm a political scientist, and I want to start with what I think is the most fundamental issue here, in this book, and in any effort of this kind. That is, if we want to explain why people or organizations do what they do in politics, we need to begin by understanding what motivates them, and understand what their interests are, because their interests will tell us what we can expect them to do, allow us to understand and ultimately predict their behavior. That's what this is about.

So, for instance, in political science we care about understanding the behavior of legislators. Well basically, what do legislators want? They want to be reelected. And that's basically how political scientists understand their behavior. We don't expect legislators to cast votes that are just in the public interest. They're elected from districts. They have strong incentives to represent their district, be responsive to powerful interests from their districts. They're responsive to campaign contributions, because they help them get reelected, right? And this doesn't happen because they're bad people. This is not a negative thing to say about them. That's the way their incentives are structured, and that's the way we have to understand their behavior. So as people they care about the public interest, but that's not what they do. In office what they do is a function of their drive to be reelected.

How do economists explain the behavior of business persons? Same kind of way. Business people are basically, in their functions as leaders of firms, let's say, are interested in making money. They're trying to maximize the profits of their firms. That doesn't mean that as people they don't care about the environment, let's say. They do, most of these people, like we all do. But if you say, hey, how about installing a $10 million scrubber in your firm, they'll say, I don't think so. Why? It's not because they don't care about the environment. It's because they're trying to make money. And this environmental concern comes into conflict with their fundamental interests. And it's the fundamental interest that wins out. And that's how we understand what they're going to do. And, again, it's not because they're bad. It's because they are leaders of business firms and the organization is rooted in this interest in making money.

Okay. Now, so what are the fundamental interests of teachers unions? Well, we can argue about that. But they do have interests. And the key to understanding their behavior is finding out what those interests are, and follow them through. And so what I would say is the basic interests of teachers unions are that they want to promote the material well being and the job security of their members, teachers, and they want to maintain and increase their own membership as unions, their resources, and their power, the most basic things. It doesn't make them bad, it makes them like all the other groups that are out there. We're just trying to characterize their basic interests.

Now, notice what I have not said. I have not said anything about good schools, making the schools better, or doing what's best for kids. Now, I think teachers care about that, definitely, and union leaders care about that. But it's not fundamental to the interests of the union. Now, this may sound offensive, but I think it's flat-out true. And it's exactly the same kind of thing we say about legislators when we say they don't fundamentally care about the public interest. That might sound offensive; [but] it's true. Basically, they cast their votes on the basis of district interests, not the national ones. That's the way their incentives are structured. It's the same way for unions. And so this is the way, I think, we need to understand their behavior. There is this conflict between the fundamental interests of unions and what's good for schools. They're not always in conflict, but they can be in conflict.

For instance, should we test incumbent teachers for their competence? Well, I think so, it just seems to me that it's obvious that that would be good for kids and good for schools. Well, the unions are against that. Why are they against it? It conflicts with their fundamental interests. That's why. They do care about good schools, but they will not do certain things, because those things conflict with their interests. That's the key to it.

So I think that works that try to explain the behavior of unions need to begin with some notion of what these fundamental interests are. They may differ with me about what they are, but they need to recognize that. It's the key to the whole thing. Now, the paper by Ballou and Podgursky does that. They have a whole section on union interests. The title of the section is "Union Interests." So for them they know this is fundamental to what it is they're trying to explain, which is this wave of professionalization. And what they say is unions have a basic interest in restricting supply, and so on, and they're integrally involved in this movement, and they're pushing for certain kinds of reforms, because these reforms are conducive to their best interests. Now, you might disagree with them, but the basic structure of the argument is exactly right. And I think this argument is right on target. And it's totally consistent with the whole political science and economics literature on this topic.

And so they're doing something that good social scientists should do. They should pull back and say, hey, unions are not special; they're not like totally different. They're political actors like other political actors. Why would we expect them to behave differently from what doctors and lawyers have done, or cosmetologists, or dog groomers. They all do the same thing. Professional self-regulation is driven by the self-interest of these groups. There's 100 years of experience here in this country. Unions are doing what all the other groups do. It's normal. It would be odd if they weren't doing that. So I think this paper is a mainstream paper, I think it's right on target.

The other paper, however, I don't. So obviously we're in disagreement on this. So let me try to explain why, and run through a few basic points. So their theme is that in what they call industrial unionism, there's emphasis on all these tight rules and regulations and so on, is totally consistent with what you'd expect from unions. And they agree that the industrial unionism model is bad for schools, which I agree with. And they say that there is this new wave, which they call reform bargaining, and which has been associated with the new union, this new thing happening. And that's sort of the wave of the future, essentially, and we're moving toward less reliance on these restrictive rules, and more reliance on flexibility and cooperative relationships between labor and management, and this is a good thing. It's a good thing for schools.

It's based, they say, on a union's recognition that they have a shared interest in better schools with the administration. So the basic idea at work here is that unions are motivated by what's good for schools. Well, I think that's not true. It could be true. But it flies in the face of what I just said about job security, the material well being of members, maintaining resources and membership of the union, maintaining the power of the union, these basic things. So it's possible that they're right, and that this is what's motivating union leaders these days, or many of them, but this is the nub of the paper.

It seems to me that if a paper is going to make this claim, at the very least there has to be a strong argument that addresses the issue squarely. Isn't this odd that these union leaders are doing this thing that seems to be flatly in conflict with their fundamental interests. So how do you explain it? Well, they don't present it that way. To them there's nothing unusual about this. I think it's really, really unusual. In fact, what I would say is, it's not happening. Now, I could be wrong. But somehow this tension has to be reconciled, and this paper ignores it. This is not a paper that even sort of recognizes what the interests are.

So what are some other explanations for this new unionism? One explanation is there really isn't any new unionism, there are just some mutants, basically, that they focused on, union leaders, perhaps like Adam, who are unusual, who are out of the mainstream in union movement, and who get focused on by people who like union reformism, who think this is great, and they focus on these people. But, in fact, this is totally unrepresentative of what's happening. That's one possibility.

The other possibility is that more union leaders are doing this, but it's totally strategic. What they're doing is they're simply taking certain stands that are responsive or adaptive to changing political circumstances, like more political demands that they be more flexible in certain ways. So they are, but their interests are the same, absolutely the same. And so if that's the case, let's just go with that, then I think this explanation for what reform bargaining really means is completely misinterpreted in this paper, because what they say is, isn't this collaboration great, now we have more flexibility, we're working things out, that's not what's happening.

What's happening is that unions are now involved in these reform contracts in a much wider range of school affairs, and as a result they have opportunities to impose inflexibilities, and restrictions, and vetoes, on many, many, many more things than they could before. It just takes a different form. Instead of the industrial model, it's a different model of unions imposing restrictions. And so especially given that the interests haven't changed and that they're not fundamentally concerned with making schools better, they're fundamentally concerned with job security, et cetera, et cetera: if that's the case — maybe I'm wrong, but if that's the case, this new model is real trouble for the schools.

Now, they claim it's good for the schools. There is no evidence in this paper that it's good for the schools. They present zero evidence that it's good for the schools. And to my knowledge, there is no evidence. To be able to point to a few examples, that's not good enough. So these are unsubstantiated claims, and I would be shocked if it turned out that this would be good for the schools, because I think this is just more inflexibilities packaged in a different way.

Okay. Finally, I'm not convinced that this is happening anywhere. The evidence that they present is almost entirely from the mid-1980s. It's sort of striking, basically what they're saying is there are really flagship districts in the 1980s. Okay. Usually what that means is they're leading some kind of movement, right?, and there were flagship districts 15, 20 years ago. But what is happening now? Well, what they do is they take a sample of 11 districts. There are 15,000 districts in this country. Eleven is like if George Gallup went out and took a Gallup poll and there were 11 people in it. That is not a sample of public opinion. And of the 11 they found 3 reform contracts.

This is not evidence that we've got a new wave of unions. And what appears to me is there is no new wave. There are a few of these reformist contracts out there. The ones that do exist, I'm willing to bet, are basically forms of collaboration that involve the unions in ways that allow them to sort of have a hand in structuring and vetoing things they don't like, and that these things are not good for schools either.

So the conclusion is, I could be wrong about this; they could be totally right. But the job, I think, of a paper like this is to grab hold of the essence of the problem, which is the unions have certain interests. What are they? Maybe I'm wrong about what they are. What are they? And are these interests consistent about the claims about the unions taking stands that are consistent with the best interests of schools, making contracts that are good for schools, and moving in a new direction. I think they aren't, but if they are, they need to justify that.

T. Loveless: Thank you. Okay. We have time for questions and discussion. You may direct your question either to an individual member of the panel, or to the panel as a whole. Please be sure to identify yourself and stand when you ask your question, so that we can pick it up for the transcript.

Question: These 11 schools: can you tell us if they're representative, how they break down nationally? And also can you tell us whether you see the reform model being more common?

S. Johnson: Okay. Thank you. First, let me just say Terry is wrong. And if you read our chapter carefully, which I hope you will, you'll see that we are not trying to make any predictions about where things are or where things are going, or any really clear statements about the issues of the interests of the unions.

What we were trying to do was look at the contracts of districts that I had studied over time. In both the samples, and they're described in the chapter, they're small samples because I did field work in each of these 11 districts over quite a long period of time. And not 15,000, not a quick survey, not a Gallup poll, but close field work. I had a good sense of what was going on in those districts, and what those contracts looked like.

Then in 1998, we got the current contracts and also some interim contracts. And what we were looking at were not the practices at that point, because this was a small study, but looking at how had those agreements changed over time, and how was that reflected in the contracts themselves. They represent a wide range of districts, from a tiny rural district to several very large urban districts. We don't claim them to be representative. This is qualitative field work. We can't do that; we wouldn't. What we were looking for was the evidence that in these districts over time they were bargaining about things in a new way.

I think Terry got our chapter mixed up with the Kershner/Koppich chapter at the end, which talks about the new unionism. We're really not writing about the new unionism; we're not writing about the national organization. We're not even writing about the local organizations. We're not trying to make big generalizations. We're looking at what has gone on, as it's reflected in the contracts, and what might it suggest about the possibilities. We are not political scientists. I reject saying that that model is the only appropriate model for looking at what's going on in schools. Teacher unions are populated by teachers, who if you know teachers well have other concerns than their own self interest, and continuous employment.

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S. Johnson: The answer is I don't see — I wouldn't be able to divide those districts. You have a district like Rochester, or Cincinnati that's an AFT district that has a lot of progressive practices. Seattle. Any of you who know Seattle will know that some of the most exciting collaborative, progressive work that's going on is going on there, and that's an NEA district. Columbus is an NEA district. So I think that what Adam was saying is that some of the districts, or the union leaders of districts in both the NEA and the AFT have realized that they share a lot of common problems and a lot of concerns about how to move unions into more progressive stances. So they meet together as a group across those lines. Those lines are not very informative anymore.

Question: Has anyone done any research on your suggestion of the difference between industrial and reform models? I mean, can you suggest that a certain percentage of the school contracts are reform?

S. Johnson: No, I don't know of any. Adam may be able to tell you. But, for this paper, and this chapter, and this analysis, we created those models. I mean, they're not brand new, but we formulated them that way. And it would take then another big study, either field study or contract study to look at that.

A. Urbanski: Let me just say that we're in the early stages of making a transition out of the industrial model of bargaining, within industrial industry. So what you now see, even the ones that are singled out as promising or exemplary, even those are within the framework of the industrial model, but sort of sticking their head out a little bit and pointing in other directions. I don't think--and that's why they are clearly not in the majority. They are still exceptions. But it's now difficult to differentiate between difference in degree from difference in kind, because we are now beginning to think, or beginning, I've already proposed, a different way of negotiating contracts, which would then substantially increase both the content and the numbers of teacher union contracts with districts that would make the transition.

In my own experience, 19 years of doing this, and 30 years in teaching, has taught me that it's not safe to assume that it's the unions who are keeping the industrial model, because nobody negotiates without another party. So really my experience has been that management has been really more reluctant to move out of that mold, because while unions then have to challenge some sacred cows of unionism, management has to also yield on management prerogatives, and one without the other will not permit the kind of climbing out of the current mold that is necessary.

T. Loveless: Other comments from the panel? Another question?

Question: I wanted to ask a follow-up question to that, which is if this new vision of unionism is coming about, what is the role of the national unions in furthering it, and do they have any ability to do so. I think there's often a perception that there's a large difference between the national unions, and what actually happens on the district level.

A. Urbanski: Well, I can tell you from direct knowledge that the national leaders of NEA and AFT are strong proponents of rethinking not only the interests of the two unions, but of the culture of the unions. I think Bob Chase has been rather overt about his call for this kind of ongoing rethinking, and so has Sandra Feldman, even with examples that she already advanced, such as not tolerating low performing schools or the thin contract proposal, and so forth. But I'll tell you that what we're doing at the Teacher Union Reform Network is actually committing to the mantra that our members will do well if students do well. And if students don't do well, then no community would or should tolerate our members doing well. In other words, we're trying to make true the old axiom that teachers want what students need, and when the two conflict what you change are the teachers wants rather than the student's needs.

I find Terry's strongly felt assumption quite curious. And maybe I misunderstand. But he is essentially saying in what seems to be a combination of Machiavellian and Marxist perspectives that there is absolutely no question that economics drives everything. I escaped that environment when I was 14 from Poland. That's what the assumption was in Communist Poland, that it is economics, economics, economics. And secondly there's sort of an uncomplimentary view of human nature, that you cannot act if it's not directly in your material self interest; that, if I believe that he really means it and has thought about it and still articulates it about teachers, I would be offended. But I know that it's not personal, because he says everybody is like that, human nature is like that.

Frankly, we are like all other mortals driven partly by self interest, partly by altruism, partly by other considerations. What teachers really want most, more than anything else, is to witness what happens when students actually get it and learn. I mean, ironically you couldn't have picked a worse example than teachers to make that I think rather gloomy point about--that underpins all the other points. That's very curious to me. I would be interested in hearing more about it.

Question: Given that that's true, how do you make the step from that assumption that you can create other motivations to actually getting unions to doing it in states and localities? I guess my question, more strategically speaking, is that a role for the national unions, for TURN, is that something that happens at the grassroots level?

A. Urbanski: Let me very briefly say from my own experience, both as vice president of the national union, as director of TURN, and my day job being local president and teacher in the Rochester City school district, it's at all levels. But the single most important level is the local level, that is I have a better chance as a local president of persuading my colleagues that parents should play a direct role in evaluation of teachers, which they do in Rochester, and 83 percent of my members voted for it. I have a greater chance than if I were either a state president, national president, or a think tank employee.

I have a better chance as a local person of persuading teachers that there should be differentiated pay, and differentiated staffing, that seniority should not be a consideration in transfers. All these things, by the way, are true. That teachers own the responsibility for participating in nurturing students' readiness to learn, that student outcome data should be a consideration in both teacher assessments, a consideration in teacher assessments, and in improvement of instruction; that all of these things, the closer you are to the reality, the more of a possibility you have to be credible to teachers.

Our problem has been really that the farther away you are from teaching and classrooms the more power you have to pass judgment on teaching. And so the ones who make policy are not the ones who have to implement it. So when you have a different set of people doing the cooking than all the people doing the eating, you have a problem. A lot of this stuff lately has not been very edible.

S. Johnson: Could I just say one thing. I hope everybody understands that the national organizations cannot and do not control what happens locally. And I know that was implicit in your question, but they basically are in an advisory and support capacity and can provide, I think, tremendous leadership by Bob Chase saying peer review is important and the locals should support it. But the locals are not obliged to do that, and so that's really why from Adam's perspective, the person who is at the local, who can speak with members, who can work with administrators, and who is involved in negotiation really is the one to affect policy that's close to practice.

T. Moe: It's been a while since I've been called a Marxist. But, I think anybody in political science or economics, who studies institutions knows that there is overwhelming evidence that people in institutions and organizations have their behavior highly structured by incentives that are shaped by the roles that they're in. And that's why legislators who are very interested in politics and policies of all kinds and who have very firm notions of their own about the public interest, they really do nonetheless represent their districts and think myopically and parochially when they're making their choices. Why do they do that? They do it because their behavior is highly structured by their institutional vocation and by their role. And union people are no different, nor are business people, or leaders of farm groups or any other organizational representatives. It would be folly on our part to assume otherwise. That's really a fundamental point.

A second point is that, as I just said, there's a distinction between the ideas that people have and what they do when they're in these organizational roles. And when we sit around and talk about ideas, you can easily lose track of that. And that's especially true, because in democratic politics there is pressure for everyone to package their own positions in terms of the public interests. And so there's a rhetoric of the public interest that everyone adheres to when they're engaged in political debate. And that rhetoric makes it difficult to discern what the real interests are beneath the surface. But if we want to understand what's going on we have to get beneath the surface and talk about the real interests, and that's what I've been trying to do.

Question: Terry, assuming we accept your argument, which I have some qualms about, but accepting it, other than doing away with unions, getting them out of education altogether, do you see ways of changing the incentives that would persuade you that unions have incentives to support education reform?

T. Moe: Well, I think workers have a right to organize and join unions if they want, and teachers do. But I think that the healthiest environment for everyone is a competitive environment. So the best situation would be for schools that are unionized to have to compete with schools that aren't. And so that way if unions impose restrictions on schools that are bad for the schools, and unproductive, in which kids don't learn as much, they have to compete with other schools that don't have to labor under those restrictions. And so if unions, as they say, are building schools that are better because of these restrictions, fine, people will choose to go to those schools. If not, they'll lose kids. That's the ultimate test. I would love to see a world in which the unions could organize schools and simply compete with non-union schools, and demonstrate just how productive they really are.

A. Urbanski: Let me just very briefly say that I don't disagree a lot with that. In other words, if that scenario existed in ways that the rest of the playing field were also level, I wouldn't have much of an argument. So, for example, if the conditions, the terms and conditions, or obligations and responsibilities of schools that are not unionized or not public were comparable to the terms and conditions under which public schools, or unionized, I think that there is not anymore--I guess the point I want to make is that this isn't your father's Oldsmobile anymore. All unions are not like they all used to be, and so you would find actually some resonance among some of us with that basic assertion, and then we could talk about some of the concomitant questions.

T. Moe: Among some of you we could. But, basically the unions are out there doing everything they can to minimize competition.

A. Urbanski: I don't think so, but you're right that they are doing everything they can to keep public schools public, and keep public support for public schools. But, I wouldn't say that — I for example proposed a competition and market dynamics for the public school system in a piece that I think I shared with you called "Make Public Schools More Like Private." But, yes, it is true that we have a difference of opinion about whether or not public schools should be supported or not. So on that we differ. But, we probably could identify a lot more common ground than we have managed to so far.

S. Johnson: Yes, I think this issue of what would happen if is a really important one, to try to get a sense of what would happen. It's hard to compare states that have bargaining laws with states that don't, because there are other factors influencing what happens in schools.

But, you can look at the development of charter schools within states where teachers are unionized. And we're only at the beginning of that. I think the charter school experience is going to be very informative in a lot of ways. The study that Tom referred to, Sometimes Bureaucracy Has Its Charm, Jonathan Landman and I interviewed teachers in six schools within Boston. Two of them were public school based management schools, two of them are within district charter schools, so in other words they have none of the regulation that Terry is concerned about, but they have some of the support of the system, so they're called pilot schools, but they're within district charters, and then two charter schools that are state chartered schools.

And we found a great deal of evidence that the teachers in these schools share common concerns, that the non-unionized schools were likely to encounter the same kind of concerns that any school would about what can you ask employees to do, can teachers really be expected to work 24/7, and to do kind of endless responsibilities. The issues were surfacing in charter schools just in the way that they have historically in the public schools.

The other thing is that in Massachusetts we have a state test called the MCAT, which we're just about to enter the third administration of. And the test scores, unlike many states in the country, charter schools in Massachusetts have to take these tests, and scores are reported and, in fact, you see almost no difference between the scores of the children in charter schools, and the scores of the children in the surrounding schools which are unionized. They reflect the socioeconomic status of their community. And there are very modest exceptions here and there in both the public, regular public and the public charter. So I think that it's a very good idea to look closely at these. And I think we're not going to find the unions in a kind of block having its affect in a uniform way.

Question: Terry, do you think it's possible that in the current political environment some reform measures may be part of unions' interests? Does it matter if it's sincere or if it's strategic?

T. Moe: Yes, it does matter, because they'll make certain strategic adjustments, the ones they have to make, and these adjustments may look on the surface as if they're doing them in order to promote better schools. But, if what's really at work, predominantly, are interests in job security, in promoting the material well being of their members, and promoting the power of the union, and so on, then once they are in these reform contracts they will use their collaboration with management to promote these other interests that are often in conflict with the best interests of kids.

A. Urbanski: If I could, let me say, Terry, I am like you. I'm a man, I'm a citizen, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a friend, I'm a son. What you're really implying is questioning the legitimacy of some individuals because of the roles they're in. I mean, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I can be a union leader and a scholar, and a citizen, and a good person, too. For you to sort of begin with the assumption that unionists, somehow, even when they do good, or do right, that that's only a strategy or a tactic is quite unfair, because we wouldn't make that assumption about you, and I don't make that assumption about you.

Frankly, I care more about where students learn — I'm a union leader, let me tell you this is my 19th year as president of the Rochester Teachers Association, and my 15th — 16th year as vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, and I get elected every two years. And I have an opponent every two years. And I have been endorsed by my members every two years. And I have told them for all of the 19 years as president that I care more about student learning than about their economic well being or anything else, or their security. And they have reelected me every two years, because they feel the same way, because that's what motivated them to go into teaching. So my motives as a teacher and as a teacher union leader includes putting a premium on student learning, my motives includes things that you don't seem to include in your sweeping assertion and stereotype about what motivates teacher unions. And it's no comfort to me that you draw a distinction between teachers and unions.

So basically what I'm saying is that you are questioning the very legitimacy of my life's work, and others. And I would encourage you to have more of an open mind to that, that we too are mortals, we too are capable of more than sort of limited self interests, just as in any other occupation, including yours.

T. Moe: Can I respond to that. I think it's important not to personalize what I do. I mean, I'm a social scientist. My job is to try to explain, to put it grandly, how the world works, how the social world works. And to think about the grander sweep of things. I, in this case, am trying to understand why unions do what they do in general, in the political process. There are 15,000 districts and Adam is the president of the union in one of them. I think it is important to separate out individual people from the whole population of unions, and to try to think in a more abstract way about the fundamentals of the situation, that is what I'm trying to do.

And I think if you think about institutions and organizations in general, one of the most fundamental things that's going on is that there is a two hat phenomenon. There is the person and there is the role. And if I were sitting here next to a member of Congress it would be the same thing. This member of Congress could say I'm offended, basically, that you're telling me that all I care about is bringing home VA hospitals to my district, when really I care about the public interest, I care about what's good for this country. The fact of the matter is, and he may be exactly right, I could be sitting here next to William Fulbright or somebody, he basically is concerned about the public interest, but in general for legislators as a whole reelection is what it's all about. That's the key to it.

And while you may be wrong for particular people, in general it's right. There is this two hat thing going on. And I think it's exactly right with regard to unions. And so personally, I feel uncomfortable having to say this in front of somebody for whom I could be wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about Adam, but I'm not really talking about Adam. I'm talking about the whole thing. And I think for the whole thing I'm right. I think it's fundamental.

S. Johnson: Yes, I think Terry has hit on something that's really important about the differences. In that I, and I think I can speak for Susan on this, and we're not interested in sweeping generalizations. And I know that those are easier to report, they're easier to put in headlines, it's easier to say that all the world is X or Y. What we are saying is that there is a tremendous amount of variation out there, and that anybody who has spent any time in schools or districts knows that a union is not a union, is not a union, and a union leader is not a union leader, is not a union leader.

The teachers for the most part want to teach their students, and they want the conditions to allow them to do that. And that the incentives at the school level for teaches bear no resemblance to what Terry is talking about. And he's trying to summarize in a very broad sweep what he thinks unions are, and we're not speaking about what unions are, except to say they are varied organizations. They have possibility, and they have hazards, and the important thing is for people who are involved in them to understand what the possibilities are, on behalf of teachers who want to teach their students.

T. Moe: Can I just add one point? The analog to this in political science would be, if we were trying to explain the behavior of legislators, and we said, legislators are very different, one person to another, you really can't generalize about them. And that would be the end of it. They're all sort of unique. So let's just sort of describe what they do.

Or business firms, if economists said, oh, they're very different, businesses, you've got big ones and small ones, and you've got different kinds of motivations. That would be the end of economic theory. I think what our job is, is to try to explain what's going on. And if you approach it in this other way where it's all about differences, what you get is no explanation at all, and ultimately no understanding of what's going on.

S. Johnson: I think we have different jobs then, because I'm not trying to explain to other people what's happening in this general way. I'm trying to help people in schools, in districts, people setting policy, figure out what's the way to shape it so that those schools can make changes that are going to support student learning.

T. Moe: Well, if you don't offer an explanation, then you give them nothing to go on.

T. Loveless: Is there another question?

Question: My experience has been along the lines Terry Moe has described. If, in your consideration, we take the two hats idea, have you thought about divorcing teachers' interests from teachers unions' interests? Would it be effective if local unions broke away from the hierarchy, AFT and NEA, to act more locally?

S. Johnson: I know Adam is going to answer that, but I think, in general, I would like to see much more of the influence at the local level, but I think it's really important to remember that the local level negotiates the contract. And so, in fact, they have a kind of independence.

The point is that legally the local organization is the negotiating agent there. I think you're right, though, that there's a lot of money spent between the national level and the local level. And some of it's spent well. It's supporting a lot of things that don't have to do with collective bargaining, but that do have to do with education, and some of it's not spent well. So I think you make an important point.

A. Urbanski: I generally agree with Susan that most of the decisions ultimately are made at the local level, and not just by the local leaders, but by the members themselves. That's my experience. I mean, I do this. That's the only way I can function is if the members say yes, secret ballot and all. So I think you may be overestimating the influence from the top. I think the AFT headquarters has neither the resources, nor the interest in supplanting my responsibilities as a local president, and there is a fierce tradition of local autonomy within AFT. I won't speak about NEA, but I would agree with the general characterization that while there may have been a time when there were sharp distinctions between NEA and AFT, we're not at that time now. And, basically, basically, the decisions are, and always have been made, at the local level more so than at the national or state. And those who don't believe so are exaggerating because they don't know. [They're] exaggerating what we know as the reality every day.

T. Loveless: Comments from the rest of the panel. Another question?

Question: What is union accountability in reform bargaining when it turns out that what the union has done turns out badly?

S. Kardos: Accountability to the public?

Question: To the public, yes.

S. Kardos: Well, the accountability to the teachers is that they would have to be reelected.

Question: What about the accountability to the public? It might be to the advantage of the teachers. Where is their accountability to the public in that situation?

S. Kardos: I think we're not quite sure what the question is, at what point the accountability comes in.

Question: When unions bargain, there's an agreement between two parties. We can get rid of the school board if that agreement turns out bad for the public. But what can the public do about the union, or the union officers if it turns out badly? That's my question to Susan.

S. Johnson: I don't think there's a direct thing to be done. I mean, I think that's what's so puzzling about it, because ultimately the school board has hired the teachers, and the teachers have elected the union leaders, and the school board is negotiating with the union leaders. So it has to be public pressure. I mean, you have disputes. For example, there's a major dispute about seniority going on in two districts right now. One is Boston, and one is Los Angeles. And the public can weigh in about that, but I think it's much more — there's not a kind of direct —

A. Urbanski: I think there is.

T. Loveless: Let's hear from the rest of the panel first.

A. Urbanski: Let me just, very briefly, say that I have lived with built-in accountability in that sense for nearly two decades. There is built-in accountability, natural accountability where if you are, let's say, maliciously irresponsible or unaccountable, even as union president of the local teachers union you feel the accountability from the context in which you must exist. That is, the attitudes of the public and the actions of the public towards the union or the terms and conditions under which you exist.

Secondly, there is built-in accountability in the public as citizenry who can then, in anger or in concern, to turn legislative remedies, turn to their lawmakers, turn to community leaders in order to change it. So we do not feel as unions and as union leaders invulnerable to the public, and we act with public accountability in mind almost built-in.

T. Loveless: Terry.

T. Moe: I think this is an absolutely fundamental issue and problem on its face. The schools are supposed to be democratically controlled, and if you read this article and read some other works on this new union movement, new unionism, basically it's an endorsement, a collaborationist model, or what political scientists would call a corporatist model in which the schools are basically run by the administration and the unions through these joint committees or whatever which meet on a variety of different issues, and basically run the schools. Nobody elected the unions. Why is it that this is an appropriate way for a democracy to control the schools. The schools are supposed to be run by elected officials who are responsible to constituencies. To the extent that the unions play an established, powerful role in that process, they are getting in the way of democratic control. And I think it does require real attention and justification because, on its face, it appears to be quite inconsistent with democratic control of the schools.

S. Johnson: Although, it's really important to understand that the teachers have been hired by the school boards that have been elected. So, it's not as though these are people who come in and who say, okay, I'm coming in to run your schools. There is a process there. It's just that if the public is dissatisfied with a particular contract provision or a particular thing that the union does, it will have to exert its influence in a political manner, publicly in the newspapers, and the accountability is a different sort than straight through the role.

A. Urbanski: But it's a weird feeling to be sitting here and to witness a conversation about my legitimacy rather than what I would have preferred, which would be a conversation of what can unions do to help solve the key problems, major among which is substantially ratchet up the learning of all students, particularly those students who now, even as we're talking, are losing their opportunity for breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and failure. Instead, I'm sitting here, and frankly it all sounds the same to me, whether you're persisting with giving reasons why I am a cancer on society and why it would be better if we were cut off, or even to hear a defense of unions in that sense. It's like the Darwinian arguments about Eastern Europeans at the turn of the century, that they have smaller cranial capacity. And they were arguing whether or not their cranial capacity will increase if generations after generations remain in America.

So unless we begin with the argument where we accept each other's legitimacy, we're going to continue in this unproductive hurdle to the real question, the real argument, and that is how can we work with each other, collaboratively, without questioning the wisdom of all teachers in America who choose to have unions. I mean, unless you're saying that society is better without unions, don't say that schools would be better, or teachers would be better without unions, because you don't want to prohibit unions in one industry and then argue that they're necessary for democracy in all the other industries. So I just find this whole thing kind of weird. I mean, maybe this is typical for what you do for a living, but it's not typical in mine.

Question: I have a quick follow up question for Ms. Johnson. I understood your answer to be that the accountability to the public would have to be very indirect, if at all, is that correct?

S. Johnson: It's not direct. I didn't say very indirect, if at all.

Question: Do you normally give people responsibility when they can't be held accountable?

S. Johnson: I'm not suggesting that teachers can't be held accountable, that the contract can't be binding, that the union agreements aren't to be enforced. The point is that what you were saying basically is, if things change, if the public is dissatisfied, then they can move the school board out quickly. Teachers are hired; they are not elected.

Question: First of all, I asked the question. But my question is this, I'm talking about the accountability to the public. The school board you can get rid of if you don't like it. If they insist on something and it goes in, and it turns out terribly, how is the public going to hold them accountable, if at all?

A. Urbanski: Don't renegotiate.

S. Johnson: They would have to elect school board members who shared those views, and then either negotiated or collaborated with the union to fashion something that was better.

T. Loveless: Let's move to a new question. Are there any more questions?

Question: I was going to ask Mr. Urbanski, if Professor Moe is wrong, how do you explain the teachers unions opposition nationally as well as locally to individual performance pay, to differentiated pay, mid-career pay, seniority system, and to charter schools?

A. Urbanski: Well, first of all, I know that there is not a single position by all teacher unions to these issues. For example, I, in my union, my local union, are not opposed to removing seniority provisions from consideration in transcripts. And we have been unopposed to that for over a decade, 14 years now. I am not opposed to differentiated staffing, or differentiated pay. We have had that since 1985, before the '87 contract. I'm not opposed to including student outcomes as a consideration or parent input in assessment of teachers. I'm not opposed to public charter schools. I'm a strong proponent of public school choice. I'm a strong and very moderately successful proponent of making public schools more like private without privatizing public education.

Question: But you're a mutant.

A. Urbanski: But the point is, I'm not a mutant. The point is that I am part of a maybe less visible, but a much larger circle. And the point is, I'm not on the fringes of teacher unionism. I'm a national vice president, and I have not been chided for my views or discouraged from my views. I've been supported.

The second part of the answer is that real change is real hard and takes real time, including in unions. See, I would be the last one to say that unions are not ever an obstacle to doing the right things. They are sometimes the problem. They're not always the problem. They're usually not the problem, my experience has been.

But there's no evidence. I haven't seen any evidence that unions are more frequently the problem than school administration, or think tanks, or anybody else. So real change takes real time. We now have a network, both national organizations are supporting these kinds of changes, and if we concentrated on specific conversations on how to encourage the promising impulses within unions, then you could bolster the likes of me rather than — I mean, this is fodder for those who say that I'm a Judas to teacher unionism, this kind of talk about our lack of legitimacy, and that we're mutants even when we do agree with those who disagree with us.

So it's very difficult, just as it's very difficult to change schools, and we need all the help that we can get from other segments of society.

T. Loveless: Terry, and then Susan.

T. Moe: I think it's important to characterize what teacher unionism is fundamentally about, and I've tried to do that. I think what Adam has done is to give examples of how what they do in Rochester sometimes departs from the norm, and I'm willing to believe that. I think there are a number of districts out of thousands, and thousands and thousands. There are some that do depart from the norm. I think what we are mainly concerned with is the norm.

And so, I think it's great that there are people who are willing to depart from the norm. But I don't think this is a response to your question. I think your question is about what's fundamentally going on. And if what's fundamentally going on is a problem, what can we do about it.

S. Johnson: Just in specific response to your question about the leadership of the unions, and what they advocate, it's very important to look item by item and union by union, because Bob Chase proposed to the membership of the NEA, the national convention, the introduction of peer review, which is a pretty unusual, progressive process that has been instituted in Rochester and Toledo, in Cincinnati, since the mid-'80s, where teachers both mentor and assess other teachers, both beginning teachers and advanced teachers. And, in fact, in at least two of those districts, I know, the rate of termination that followed from that process was higher than when the administrators controlled it.

And so, this is a position that the president of the NEA has advocated and has won support for. It is not the kind of position that most people would talk about when they're trying to talk about the norm of unions. You would find similar variation in seniority, and I think this year you're going to hear similar variation in differentiated pay.

So, look closely at what, in fact, at what particular proposals are, and resist these sweeping generalizations about all union leaders, or all unions, or the norm, because I don't think they're informative.

A. Urbanski: I want to say very quickly, we are making progress, but we're not making enough progress, and it's not moving fast enough. And you all think I'm talking about unions, I am. But I'm also talking about schools. And so, just as with schools also with unions, the real question, the one I would like to have an extended conversation because I'm confident we can find a lot more common ground than disagreement with Terry and with others, I think with Dale, the real question would be this, how do we turn exceptions into the norms. Both in schools, that is making the excellent school the norm rather than the exception, because we're sort of moving here on a treadmill also because we're just proving over and over again that we can have an excellent school if we concentrate resources attention, and talent in a particular school. That's already proving what's been proven.

The question is, how do you help those whom God hasn't already helped? How do you make the exceptional school the norm? How do you make the kind of union we envision the norm? I would be willing to work on that, and towards that. I respectfully suggest that it would be a more productive conversation than arguing about whether we would be better off without it. You're not going to live without teachers in education. And as long as you have teachers, you must grant them the democratic right to elect collective voices and representation. That's why I came to America, because you have a right to have that.

So if we're not saying let's not give them that right, don't question what they elected; work with them. And trust that if they are embarrassed or hurt by it, they will unelect them, they have that right.

T. Loveless: Let me pose a question to the panel as a whole, dealing with the issue of teacher quality. There was a debate between Checker Finn and Linda Darling-Hammond at the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on how to improve teacher quality. Darling-Hammond takes the position that the rules for entering the profession should be raised, made more rigorous. Finn argues that the barriers to entering the profession should be lowered, while emphasizing results — in other words, judging teachers by how much their students learn as opposed to the number of education courses the teachers complete. Would you each comment on that debate and the unions' role in it?

S. Johnson: Okay, I'm going to start and Susan is going to add because we've been involved in some research interviewing new teachers, really trying to get a sense of the next generation of teachers. We're going to have a shortage that's tremendous, it's being felt in California already. And we're going to, in the next decade, have to employ 2.2 million new teachers. And so we have been interviewing new teachers to try to get a sense of what matters to them.

It's pretty clear to us that neither of these answers is adequate. That high regulation is, in fact, not going to create enough supply of teachers to staff the schools effectively. We know historically from the last time large numbers of teachers were hired that no school district will allow a class to remain uncovered. There has to be a teacher in every classroom. In the '50s and in the '60s, there were a lot of warm bodies hired, many of them are the teachers that school districts cannot figure out what to do with today.

So we know that people will be hired, and it is important that good people be hired. There are alternative pathways being developed that wouldn't go through the very long teacher ed program which probably is ideal, I think, for preparing people to really do the job well. And what we're going to have to come out with, I believe, is a strategy that's going to both have training, high level training, a lot of preparation for teachers who plan to stay in teaching for a long time and can provide leadership within the school, but we're also going to have very well structured alternative pathways that provide induction for people in a shorter term way, so that those who are hired to cover the classrooms that will be empty really know what they're doing and have support. So I think it's a really bad mistake to see this as either or and I know that's how it's being played out.

S. Kardos: I would just add that the really aggressive measures to get people in fast are, from the new teachers that we've been talking to, those teachers who have been recruited in by using large bonuses and quick routes, have no idea what to do, even though those are supposedly the ones that we want to get in, the highly qualified, the ones who have big science backgrounds, and have spent a lot of time in industry before their career entrance. Without a really strong induction program, ongoing support for teachers, those kinds of programs are going to leave us with a lot of what we already have, teachers who don't know what to do.

T. Loveless: Other panelists want to comment?

T. Moe: I'll say something. I think the standard perspective that almost anyone tends to adopt initially is that if we need better teachers, then what we need to do is train people more intensively to be teachers. So if they're now spending a year in education schools, they should spend like more than a year, and we should really beef up those programs. But the downside of that is big, and that is that it restricts the supply of teachers, it makes it a very daunting and unattractive thing for a lot of people who would like to go into teaching, who would like to try it, and who may be very creative, and very enthusiastic, and who are thinking, wow, maybe I'd like to do this. But they won't do it, they won't do it if they have to go to education school for even a year, or two years, there are other opportunities. And the smarter they are, and the more trained they are in various fields, the more opportunities they are going to have.

And so it seems to me that the way to do this is sort of the opposite. I mean, we should start by saying, there should be no special qualifications, you have to have a bachelor's degree, and beyond that the schools should be able to choose anyone they want. So, for instance, right now I couldn't teach high school government because I'm not qualified, I don't have a certificate, right? I only have a Ph.D. in political science, and that's not good enough for the public schools. There are lots of people in Silicon Valley who are maybe retired engineers, or chemists, they can't teach in the schools either because they haven't gone to an education school, and they aren't qualified. Well, this is ridiculous.

So, I think what we need to do is to free up the whole system, get away from this education school business. There's no evidence, also, no evidence, that people who go to education schools are better teachers. We're spending a ton of money putting people through education schools, and turning away all kinds of people who could be teachers. There's no evidence that we should be doing this.

So there's one missing point in here that needs to be filled in if this is going to work, and that is that schools have to have an incentive to hire the best people. And under the current system, the schools really don't have a strong incentive to do that, because as things are now arranged if the schools do a lousy job, they still get kids, and they still get money. They're not competing with anybody. And so if they hire lousy teachers, or their friends, or something like that, then the school still gets money and kids.

So I think what we need to do at the same time that we free up licensing and accreditation, that we need to introduce more choice and competition that gives schools incentives to hire the best people, and then allow them to have access to a much bigger pool of people, and they can attract these people who are enthusiastic and interested, and may be great teachers, but now are just screened out entirely.

A. Urbanski: I agree with more choice and competition because I like the way you said it also, because it doesn't polarize the conversation as all or nothing. We need more choice and competition.

And, by the way, I am not a fan of teacher education. This is a charitable way to say it. However, Al Shanker used to have a nice expression, he said that believing that all you have to do to be a good teacher is to love to teach would be like saying that all you have to do to be a good surgeon is to love to cut.

The same question that you posed, different profession, unthinkable. Just substitute the word teacher for pilot, engineer, I mean unthinkable. So I'm asking myself, nursing, I'm not just talking about high paid professions, let's talk about an exploited profession, nursing, unthinkable. But for teaching somehow it's okay. As a matter of fact, we get folks like Terry to say, you're not going far enough. We ought to have a free-for-all, professional wrestling match, cage match with no holds barred. Unless you want to write off teaching as a profession, write it off, then deconstruct the question and look at what it is that makes it a profession. Standards, including coming in, has to be part of it. Whether or not these are exactly the standards to be measured, how Linda Darling Hammond suggested it be measured, we can talk about that. But standards are needed.

I happen to think that we should have more and more thoughtful alternative routes into teaching, particularly in this time of shortage. So, no, I'm not in favor of more hoops to jump through, or more obstacles, but I am in favor of having some standards. I'm not in favor of saying, let's just open up the gates and see what happens. And then, by the exit part, that's somebody's daughter or son. I mean, let's not forget. We're talking about kids. We're not talking about unringing the bell, because these kids go through junior high only once.

So I think it's not a lot more complicated than you framed it, but a lot more complex than you framed it, and there is no single answer, yes or no, to a question that's polarized.

D. Ballou: Well, the whole notion that the teaching profession needs to be regulated, and that there needs to be licensing standards to determine who is allowed to teach, is predicated on mistrust of the decisions that would be made if there weren't that licensing. And there are some reasons to be mistrustful, there are plenty of school districts where hiring procedures are not very sound. There's nepotism, cronyism, people who are making these decisions are not skilled at identifying good teachers. And we do need to be concerned about what goes on there. And we're not probably in a position yet to just throw it wide open.

But there are also plenty of school districts that take advantage of any loophole they can find in existing regulations in licensing to bring in talented people who don't have conventional backgrounds, and we ought to promote that.

So, my suggestion in this area is that when schools are demonstrating that they're well-managed, they're meeting the standards that we're insisting on for student performance, when they've had the kind of reviews that now are taking place in a lot of states, including my own, that, to the extent that schools demonstrate the ability to manage their affairs, these kind of decisions ought to be left up to local administrators. This doesn't mean anybody is allowed to teach. It means to get a teaching job, you have to persuade the person who is responsible for the school that you're the right person for the job.

School administrators are in a better position to identify teachers who are right for their schools than are state bureaucrats looking at licenses and test scores to determine who should be licensed. Administrators also have stronger incentives to make the decision correctly. They're the ones who will be working with these teachers, who will need to get production out of them. When administrators signal that they're competently carrying out the demands of their positions, there should be a presumption in their favor when it comes to deciding who are the best teachers for their schools. Personally, I can't think of anything better than that. If school administration is working well, it should be free to hire whomever it wants.