Collective Bargaining

Collective bargaining is a process, borrowed from private-sector labor relations between employer and employee, which governs the employment conditions of a majority of U.S. public school teachers. In states that permit collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees, the employees usually must agree to utilize the collective bargaining process through an election to choose their representative. Once chosen, the teacher representative, usually a local of one of the two national teachers' unions, proceeds to negotiate the conditions of teacher employment with the employer, almost always a local school board.

From the point of view of teachers and their unions, collective bargaining was a hard-won reform through which teachers gained a voice in their employment and working conditions. From the point of view of many critics of collective bargaining, it is a vehicle through which teachers have gained an inordinate amount of influence over their employment, particularly in the form of an almost dismissal-proof work situation, as well as a device teachers and their unions utilize to thwart necessary reforms of schools to enhance student achievement. As is often the case when situations are conceptualized according to binary views, the truth about collective bargaining lies somewhere in between the two extremes. It is neither as reform-oriented a process as teachers and teacher unions deem it to be, nor is it the obstacle to reform that critics describe.

Collective bargaining for public school teachers was largely a result of the significant amount of unionization of public school teachers that took place initially in U.S. cities in the late 1950s and the 1960s, and subsequently in many suburban and rural districts. The process was usually initiated, and then facilitated, by units of either the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association, the two major national teachers' unions. For much of the time until the 1990s, the two national unions expended great energy to obtain the right to bargain, or in National Education Association language to negotiate, on behalf of teachers in a given school district. Since 1990 or shortly thereafter, however, the two unions have largely stopped competing with each [Page 179]other. The success of the efforts of each is one reason for the cessation of competition, as is the realization that further growth would be more difficult to attain than past growth, given the near saturation of collective bargaining agreements in states that had legalized the process and the unlikelihood of it being adopted in states that had not done so.

In its early years, collective bargaining was a process that engendered much debate about the liberation of shackled teachers on the one hand and the supposed enslavement of school districts and the children they served to an iron-clad process that hampered innovation on the other. That apocalyptic view of the situation was challenged conceptually in 1956 with publication of a book by educational analyst Myron Lieberman that argued that collective bargaining was the proper vehicle for the professionalization of teaching and educational improvement, rather than the obstacle to those outcomes described by critics. Lieberman's analysis proved to be the theoretical base for the expansion, almost the explosion, of collective bargaining agreements that took place in the ensuing 2 decades. Ironically, in the 1980s and 1990s, and thereafter, Lieberman recanted his positive ideas about collective bargaining and adopted a strong position against the process, and public education as well, as developments that shackled necessary innovation in education and protected poor teachers from the consequences of their performance. The irony of the situation was enhanced by the vigor of Lieberman's position, as he first advocated and then criticized collective bargaining for teachers.

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