SACRAMENTO, CA - California’s most powerful special interest lobby, the California Teachers Association (CTA), is pushing legislation, AB 2160, that will expand collective bargaining to give teacher unions power over curriculum, textbooks and academic standards. A new study by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), however, shows that the unions have used collective bargaining to neuter the authority of local school boards, protect bad teachers, restrict principals, force non-union teachers to pay union fees, and damage student achievement.

CTA president Wayne Johnson says that teachers are the experts who know what’s best for students. However, many teachers opposed effective phonics programs, supported bilingual education, and continue to promote fuzzy math and other unproven “progressive” teaching techniques. Johnson says that AB 2160 “will simply give teachers and parents a participating voice into how local education decisions are made.” Parents?…

In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Johnson says negotiations over standards, curriculum and textbooks would take place between districts and the teacher unions behind closed doors. Parents, he sniffed, might be consulted on the side “if they have some qualifications.”

Californians should be aware of the negative effect of collective bargaining on public education. In its just-released study, Contract for Failure: The Impact of Teacher Union Contracts on the Quality of California’s Schools, PRI analyzed 460 union contracts and found that 337 -- almost 75 percent -- yield the teacher unions too much power over issues such as school management, teacher transfer and assignment, and teacher evaluation and accountability.

For instance, according to the PRI report, teacher performance “rarely has an impact on salaries.” Seniority rights contained in contracts allow a poor-performing teacher to remain in the profession, “without improving his or her performance, and still receive a salary increase.” Given that teacher quality is the key factor in raising student achievement, the study finds, “Failure to hold teachers accountable is the single greatest flaw of collective bargaining and underlies its adverse effect on the quality of education.”

Also, many contracts including all contracts in the ten largest school districts in California allowed for binding arbitration to settle teacher grievances. Giving final decision about grievances to a non-elected, non-accountable arbitrator erodes the authority of the elected school board and the interests of the voters who elected the board.

Many contracts allow union members to attack issues not related to their contract. One contract broadly defined grievances as not only violations of the contract itself, but also violations of “any law, existing Board Policy, practice or regulation relating to provisions of this agreement.” In other words, virtually anything could become a grievance. With binding arbitration, the non-elected arbitrator could make management decisions about school resources in favor of the union. According to the PRI report, this “may not be in the best interests of the students or the overall management of the district.”

Rather than expanding the scope of contract negotiation as the CTA proposes, the PRI study recommends limiting the scope of collective bargaining, abolishing teacher tenure based on seniority, eliminating binding arbitration, streamlining the dismissal process for incompetent teachers, and giving the public greater access to the negotiation process. The study concludes that “collective bargaining is an impediment to educational quality, part of the problem, not the solution.”

Lance Izumi is a Senior Fellow in California Studies at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for
Public Policy. He can be reached via email at lizumi@pacificresearch.org.