eachers’ paychecks, as this guarantees unions a regular flow of money and shifts administrative costs onto the districts.
The unions put the best public face on their collective-bargaining demands, arguing that what is good for teachers is good for kids and that they are just fighting for quality public schools. It is obvious, however, that many aspects of union influence (not all) have negative consequences for kids and schools. How can it be socially beneficial that schools can’t get rid of bad teachers? Or that teachers can’t be tested for competence? Or that teachers can’t be evaluated based on how much their students learn? Or that principals are so heavily constrained they can’t exercise leadership of their own schools?
It is also clear that union-generated rules add tremendously to the bureaucratization of schools. The unions are responsible for making the system much more formal, complex, and impersonal than it would otherwise be. These characteristics tend to undermine school performance. Schools tend to do best when they function in an informal, cooperative, flexible, and nurturing way-which is precisely the opposite of bureaucracy.
Little research specifically links teacher unions to school performance, so it is impossible to make an ironclad, fully documented case about the direction of union effects. The few existing studies have produced mixed results, some showing negative effects and some showing positive effects. But many of these findings are probably spurious, arising because the data are very poor and hard to get and the methodological difficulties are formidable.
The most recent addition to this literature, an article by Lala Carr Steelman, Brian Powell, and Robert M. Carini in the Winter 2000 issue of the Harvard Educational Review, claims that unions have positive effects on performance, and its findings are being touted by union enthusiasts. This analysis, too, needs to be regarded with care. Its measures of school performance, for example, are SAT and ACT scores, which clearly do not measure the actual performance of the schools (as the unions are usually the first to point out). And because these and other variables are aggregated to the state level for analysis, there are dangers in drawing inferences about causal processes (like union influence) at the school level. An analysis that minimizes these sorts of problems, and is the most sophisticated of the tests of union impact, was carried out a few years ago by Harvard economist Caroline M. Hoxby and published in the August 1996 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Hoxby found that unions have negative effects on school performance.
The unions are responsible for making the education system much more formal, complex, and impersonal than it would otherwise be. These characteristics tend to undermine school performance.
The most confident conclusion that can be drawn from this literature is that unions increase the costs of education, apparently by an average of 8 to 15 percent-and without (as far as can be determined) a corresponding increase, or any increase at all, in school quality. This tends to support the argument that, for a given level of spending, unions make the production of quality education more difficult.
Collective bargaining is the bread-and-butter activity of teacher unions. The key to their preeminence in American education, however, is their ability to combine collective bargaining and politics into an integrated strategy for promoting union objectives.
Teacher unions are active in politics at all levels: local, state, and national. In local politics the teacher unions are in the astounding position of being able to determine who sits on local school boards, and thus with whom they will be bargaining. Needless to say, the unions have strong incentives to mobilize for political purposes, to participate actively in electoral campaigns, and to identify and recruit sympathetic candidates. These incentives are all the stronger because districts make decisions on a wide range of policy, taxing, and funding issues of great re