Teachers Unions Mean Better Teachers, New Study Says
To hear the hedge fund managers, real estate moguls, and software billionaires trying to reshape public education tell it, unions are the worst thing to happen to education ever since they supposedly make it impossible to fire crappy teachers.
A new study shows they have the opposite effect though: districts are more careful to weed out the bad apples before they get tenure.
And the reality is, a lot of districts (and those billionaires) don't care about how good or bad teachers are--they just want to replace expensive experienced ones with inexpensive inexperienced ones, which is why Teach for America exists.
When will we start basing our public education policy on what people with some expertise in the field say instead of what some rich guys who are looking to lower their taxes and/or siphon off our tax dollars for their profits from charter schools, software, and the real estate of closed schools?
If Democrats wanted to win back supermajorities in the House and Senate, they could say that they were dead wrong to try to privatize public education, and the correct role for the wealthy in our schools is to pay more taxes to lower class size and increase social services instead of testing, punishing, and draining money away in their various scams.
By demanding higher salaries for teachers, unions give school districts a strong incentive to dismiss ineffective teachers before they get tenure. Highly unionized districts dismiss more bad teachers because it costs more to keep them. Using three different kinds of survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics, I confirmed that unionized districts dismiss more low-quality teachers than those with weak unions or no unions. Unionized districts also retain more high-quality teachers relative to district with weak unionism. No matter how and when I measured unionism I found that unions lowered teacher attrition.
This isn’t all theoretical. Thanks to Republican state governments in Indiana, Idaho, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, Han had the chance to see how this played out in recent years:
If you believe the argument that teachers unions protect bad teachers, we should have seen teacher quality rise in those states after the laws changed. Instead I found that the opposite happened.
http://www.alternet.org/labor/teachers-unions-mean-better-teachers-new-study-says
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