stricting the discretion available to administrators. For principals and district officials, discretion means the ability to lead and manage. For unions, however, it means that administrators make decisions about where, when, and how teachers do their work and how incentives are structured-which is unacceptable. Discretion is to be driven out, replaced by rules that define realms of teacher autonomy.
• Unions tend to oppose anything that induces competition or differentiation among teachers. This applies to performance-based assessments, but also to many other policies. They are opposed, for example, to differential pay in response to market conditions (which might mean paying math and science teachers a premium to attract and hold them). Unions want teachers to have the same interests, because this promotes solidarity. The notion that some teachers are better than others, or worth more than others, is stridently resisted.
• Unions tend to oppose anything that induces competition among schools. Most fundamentally, they want all schools in a district to be covered by the same contract, because the schools not covered (and free of the costs and rigidities it imposes) would have an advantage. This would be especially true if the noncovered schools were allowed to be different in other ways too, and if parents were free to choose, for then the noncovered schools might attract kids, jobs, and resources away from the union schools. The union ideal is that all schools be regulated the same and that all be guaranteed their “fair share” of students and money.
• Unions tend to oppose any contracting-out of educational functions that involves a shift of jobs and resources from public to private. This is true even if privatization may provide better services at lower cost. The goal is to keep public employment and spending as high as possible.
• Unions want contract provisions that require all teachers to become members and that force nonmembers to pay “agency fees.” They also want dues and fees automatically deducted from teachers’ 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 meas