Beyond Better Wages, Benefits, and Conditions

A look at how a handful of local teachers union presidents are revamping an old institution to keep a new generation of educators interested.

by Lory Hough

He was so well known that Albert Shanker, head of one of the largest national teachers unions in the United States from the 1960s through the 1980s, would get recognized even by customs officials in Canada. “I trust you based on your reputation,” one agent allegedly told him, pre-9/11, as he waved him through without bothering to check his bags.

The presidents of today’s teachers unions aren’t nearly as well known, but, as Professor Susan Moore Johnson, M.A.T.’69, Ed.D.’81, found in her new study, “Leading the Local,” understanding them is critical, especially local presidents who are trying to figure out how to move beyond the traditional union agenda — wages, benefits, and conditions — in an effort to bring energy back to a oncepowerhouse institution that is being snubbed by a new generation of teachers.

Surprisingly, almost no research has been done on the thousands of women and men who oversee the 14,000 local National Education Association (NEA) affiliates or the 3,000 local American Federation of Teachers (AFT) affiliates, despite the fact that it is these leaders, Johnson says, who hold the greatest “sway” over public school teachers and students.

“Many people think that national unions dictate school practice,” she says. “They don’t realize how much is determined at the local level when contracts are negotiated. Contracts, each of which is locally negotiated, establish pay and working conditions — hours, class size, and evaluation — for teachers. Collective bargaining provides a legal, structured process in which local unions and management can develop reforms, such as peer review or performance-based pay.”

Although private employees were guaranteed the right to form and join unions and negotiate their employment in 1935 when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, that right still doesn’t exist for all public employees, including teachers. Wisconsin passed the first collective bargaining law in 1959 for teachers. Today, 45 states permit or require it and a few, like Texas, ban it.

Johnson says that in states where it is permitted, “given the challenges that public schools face today as a result of competition and accountability, the local union president has a great deal of responsibility for leadership in this process.” Which is why she and a team of four Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral students conducted in-depth interviews with 30 local union presidents from six states: California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio. The presidents ranged in age from 29 to 60 and all had been elected in the past eight years. Nearly all were longtime union members.

“We were looking for diversity in the kind of statutes that regulate bargaining, the region of the country, and the mix of NEA and AFT affiliates,” Johnson says.

What they found was surprising: Most presidents at the local level were not robotically focused on the traditional union agenda of better pay, better benefits, and better conditions.

"...There really is no monolithic teachers union. Policy and practice are made daily in districts and through relationships among local leaders.” – Morgaen Donaldson, Ed.M.'97 “I was surprised by how much variation there was in the presidents’ views,” says doctoral student Morgaen Donaldson, Ed.M.’97, a former dues-paying teacher in Boston who also waived part of her union contract when she worked in a pilot school. “In some instances, presidents of unions in adjacent districts had diametrically opposed positions on innovations in teacher pay or how aggressive to be with management. This study taught me that there really is no monolithic teachers union. Policy and practice are made daily in districts and through relationships among local leaders.”

And these local leaders are trying new things. “Virtually all were involved in some sort of reform that wouldn’t have been conceived of in the 1960s,” Donaldson says, or during the 1970s, when her father, a member of the Boston Teachers Union, attended meetings at the smoke-filled hockey rink at Boston University. “In those days, it seemed like there was very little room for dissent in the union. I feel like now there is more room and the leaders are trying to think creatively to improve schools in the district.”

Although the presidents in the study said it was “essential” to focus on the traditional union agenda, as Marietta English, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union said in the report, “You have to do more than that.”

And the biggest factor driving the change has been pressure from their newest — and least interested — members.

“Almost all of the leaders we spoke to — even those who we had anticipated were very traditional — spoke about how they needed to rethink their agenda in light of some of today’s pressures for accountability and having to deal with the needs and desires of new teachers,” says doctoral student Mindy Sick Munger, Ed.M.’01, a former union member who also interacted with state-level union officials when she worked as a policy aide to Governor Jim Edgar in Illinois. “I was shocked that this need to expand the agenda was as seemingly universal as it sounded rather than being limited to just a few progressive union leaders.”

Even Albert Shanker understood this: In 1989 he told The New York Times, ‘’I want to create more effective and more humane schools, and to do that you need a new kind of union and new approaches to bargaining,” he said. “You don’t sell a union abstractly. You sell it by building an organization that people want.”

And as it turns out, unions may not be what younger teachers want anymore, at least not in the rarely questioned way that veteran teachers accepted the need for unions since collective bargaining started nearly five decades ago.

“Unions,” says local president Sherrill Neilsen from Needham, Mass., “are not even on their radar screens.”

Johnson, who oversees the Ed School’s Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, witnesses this every semester at Harvard. “I teach a course on teachers unions and school improvement,” she says. “Typically three-fourths of the students who enroll have negative views of unions and can’t imagine that they can be active and constructive participants in school reform.”

Part of the reason why, she says, is because things have gotten better for teachers.

“It’s an historical situation. When contracts were first negotiated, the working conditions were much worse than they are today,” she says. “There were no assurances on how many classes you’d be asked to teach or whether you had any source of redress if you were abused — protections that are now assumed to be part of the workplace for teachers.” (Conditions were even worse when the NEA started in 1857, followed by the AFT in 1916.)

“Schools are still not ideal, but newer teachers take for granted the guarantees. It’s not that they want different things, but they’re entering the profession at a different point. If younger teachers see unions as only protecting their working conditions, and conditions are relatively good, then why should they waste their money?” – Professor Susan Moore Johnson “Many of the things they would have had to fight for have been provided; they’re a given,” Johnson says. “Schools are still not ideal, but newer teachers take for granted the guarantees. It’s not that they want different things, but they’re entering the profession at a different point. If younger teachers see unions as only protecting their working conditions, and conditions are relatively good, then why should they waste their money?”

Like all teachers, they want good wages, benefits, and working conditions, but, as the local presidents in the study point out, young teachers also want stronger support in the first years of teaching, ongoing training, innovations in pay, and opportunities to take on different roles in schools. As a result, says Rhonda Jackson of the Columbus Education Association in Ohio, “We’re running a couple of parallel organizations.” One for baby boomers, the other for younger teachers who, she says, “expect us to be service-oriented [and] expect their calls to be returned right away.”

The quandary for local presidents is that neither group can be favored. “The veteran teachers are the loyal members,” Johnson says, “but over time, if the presidents don’t engage the newer members, they won’t be an organization; they’ll be a service arm answering questions.”

Historical advances explain only part of the reason younger teachers aren’t embracing unions. As Tom Lynch, president of the union in Westminster, Colo., says, the first priority for new teachers is “keeping their heads above water.” They also may not be looking toward the future in the same way that veteran teachers are, in part because many don’t anticipate teaching for their entire careers.

“Consequently, some of the issues — retirement, for example — are less important to them than initial pay or opportunities to get support in their early years of teaching,” Johnson says. “These are characteristics of the teachers, but also of the larger cohort in society. So consequently, it’s partly historical, partly generational.”

In addition, a fairly large percentage of newer teachers are entering the profession as a second or third career. “Our research suggests that between one-third and one-half of new teachers are entering teaching after a substantial period of time working in another field,” she says. “These rates vary by region and state. Many who come to teaching from non-union fields such as engineering, technology, or law question the need for unions.”

In response, in order to not only attract, but keep members, many local presidents have taken on one of the hallmarks of the traditional union agenda: teacher pay. Typically, most teachers are paid using the single salary scale, a formula of years of experience (steps) and educational credentials (lanes). For younger teachers who don’t plan on staying in teaching until retirement, steps and lanes don’t necessarily work, so many local presidents are experimenting with stipends for extra time worked or for specialized roles, as well as pay incentives for hard-to-staff subjects and schools.

This surprised Emily Kalejs Qazilbash, Ed.M.’97, a fifth-year doctoral student who was in a union as a public school teacher and also taught in a charter school, which wasn’t unionized. “Some reforms are small and affect small numbers of teachers, but it was exciting to see how union presidents are working with their members to expand the single salary scale and to agree that some teachers will be paid more than others,” she says. “This finding beautifully illustrates our statement that local teachers unions — local presidents — are making some major changes to ‘usual’ union business.”

Other changes include peer assistance and review programs that allow consulting teachers more say in who gets rehired, mentoring programs, and short, professional development courses for teachers.

Johnson says these changes are all necessary if teachers unions want to keep in step with changes in the teaching profession. When asked if she thinks teachers unions will ever disappear, despite the changes she is seeing at the local level, Johnson says no. “The question is not whether they will continue to shape local education policy,” she and her students wrote in the study, “but how they will do so.”

“There are clearly some proponents of eliminating unions and collective bargaining, but I think that’s unrealistic at this point,” Johnson says. “Districts rely on their unions to create policy, but I do think if they don’t change, they may become insignificant players in shaping the policy and practice of K–12 education. If union leaders are seen as looking to the past rather than the future, those who make policy will simply step around or over them.”

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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