Do union contracts and seniority rights prevent high-poverty schools from getting and keeping qualified teachers? As AFT researcher Howard Nelson notes in the May/June American Teacher, "This assumption is, literally, an urban legend."

New teachers actually are evenly distributed between low-poverty schools (6.1 percent) and high-poverty schools (5.7 percent) in urban districts with collective bargaining, he says. Further, in states without collective bargaining, new teachers are placed in high-poverty schools at three times the rate of low-poverty schools.

Click here for a summary of findings from Nelson's upcoming report on the issue, "The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Teacher Transfer Rates in Urban High-Poverty Schools."

May, 2006