t how grievances are to be handled. Rules about numbers of faculty meetings. Rules about how often teachers can be required to meet with parents. Rules about who has to join the union. Rules about whether dues will be deducted automatically from paychecks. Rules about union use of school facilities. And more.
Union demands on these and other scores are not random or frivolous. Fundamental interests motivate their behavior and determine the kinds of rules they find desirable. These interests arise from the primordial fact that, in order to prosper as organizations, unions need to attract members and money. Most of what they do can be understood in terms of these simple goals-which entail, among other things, securing benefits and protections for members, increasing the demand for teachers, supporting higher taxes, regularizing the flow of resources into union coffers, minimizing competition, and seeking political power.
Note that these interests and the behaviors they entail need have nothing to do with what is best for children, schools, or the public interest; indeed, they may clearly conflict with them. For this reason, collective bargaining often leads to contracts that make little sense as blueprints for effective organization.
By way of illustration, here are some common themes that give substance to the typical contract:
• Unions are dedicated to protecting the jobs of all members. The rules they insist upon make it virtually impossible for schools to get rid of even the worst teachers, not to mention those who are merely mediocre.
• Unions don’t want decisions about pay, promotions, assignments, or transfers to be based on performance. As they see it, performance evaluations create uncertainty for their members, force members to compete with one another, and put discretion in the hands of superiors. The unions want personnel decisions to be based on seniority and formal education, which offer advancement to all teachers regardless of their competence.
• Unions seek to expand teachers’ rights by severely restricting 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 t