Staffing solutions and straw men

Look for union-negotiated contracts to suffer a fair amount of scapegoating as NCLB reauthorization heats up.

A number of groups, including the U.S. Department of Education, have drawn a bulls-eye on a section of the law that guarantees NCLB can’t be used to undercut collective bargaining agreements in place in school districts around the country. This section should be cut from the next installment of NCLB, these groups argue, so that districts have a free hand in making teaching assignments at hard-to-staff schools.

But blaming school staffing on the contract is a straw-man argument—it simply won’t hold water, a growing body of research strongly suggests, and it’s often voiced by groups that were working to weaken unions long before school staffing issues appeared on their radar. In March, the Institute for Research on Education Policy & Practice at Stanford University released a study looking at collective bargaining and its impact on teacher assignment in the state. The study finds “no per-suasive and systematic evidence” that contracts and their seniority rules independently affect the distribution of teachers among schools. Nor is there evidence, the authors conclude, that contracts lead to a teacher quality gap that hurts schools serving higher minority populations.

What’s really needed is “a greater role for the state in creating incentives for teachers to work in difficult-to-staff schools,” researchers William Koski and Eileen L. Horng conclude in their report “Curbing or Facilitating Inequality? Law, Collective Bargaining, and Teacher Assignment Among Schools in California.” “Merely changing the language of teacher-assignment provisions will do little to close the teacher quality gap.”

The report confirms many of the conclusions contained in a 2006 AFT report that analyzes school and staffing data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The data reveal that “if anything, collective bargaining is associated with lower transfer rates out of urban high-poverty schools,” AFT senior researcher F. Howard Nelson writes in the Winter 2006-07 issue of American Educator. “In urban districts with a collective bargaining agreement, high-poverty schools are no more likely than low-poverty schools to replace transferring teachers with first-year teachers. In stark contrast, in urban districts without a collective bargaining agreement, high-poverty schools hire first-year teachers at three times the rate of low-poverty schools.”

NCES researchers recently analyzed teacher turnover statistics contained in the 2003-04 schools and staffing survey. The top three factors cited by public school teachers who changed buildings: opportunities for a better assignment by grade level or subject, dissatisfaction with administrator support and dissatisfaction with workplace conditions.