Teachers unions are simultaneously the most important institutional defender of public education and the most effective institutional obstacle to the specific reforms that some public education improvements require.
The Union's Role
Teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers and their state and local affiliates — occupy a specific institutional position in American education governance that makes them simultaneously indispensable and controversial. They are indispensable as the institutional mechanism through which the professional interests of teachers — compensation, working conditions, due process protections, professional autonomy — are represented in the political and collective bargaining processes that determine educational policy and employment conditions. The teacher compensation that is too low to attract and retain the high-quality instructors that effective education requires is in part the consequence of the decades before strong teacher unionism when teacher compensation was determined by local school boards with limited countervailing power from teachers.
They are controversial as the institutional mechanism through which the employment interests of teachers — job security, seniority protections, due process before dismissal — can conflict with the accountability interests of students and the public. The specific union contract provisions that constrain principals' ability to remove ineffective teachers, that protect senior teachers from the layoffs that budget cuts require regardless of performance, and that limit the flexibility of school management to make the organisational decisions that effective school operation requires are the provisions that education reformers argue limit the reforms that evidence suggests improve student outcomes.
The teachers union question is the question of how to design the institutional relationship between teacher professional interests and student outcome accountability in a way that serves both. The governance challenge is that these interests are genuinely in tension — and that the institutional mechanisms that serve one imperfectly can undermine the other. The answer is not the elimination of teacher professional representation but the redesign of the institutional relationship in ways that align teacher and student interests more effectively.
Discussion