<p>The area private and parochial schools hire non union teachers and there are many qualified candidates who happily apply for those jobs despite or in spite of their being nonunion. These schools can terminate the poorly performing ones at will which better ensures quality control. Unfortunately our local public schools cannot freely terminate underperforming teachers. This helps create and sustain poorly performing schools. In my community, teachers unions seem to be part of the problem, not a solution to underperforming schools.</p>
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<p>In our area, the public schools are far superior to parochial schools by every measurable outcome (test scores, curriculum offerings, college acceptances etc). </p>
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<p>I agree very much with this balanced analysis. Bad administrators and vindictive, misguided parents are a reality. I have seen very good teachers protected by the union from 1) parents who refused to acknowledge their child’s mental illness and criminality, and 2) a cowardly administrator who would have thrown an excellent non-tenured educator under the bus for the sake of convenience. It changed my view of unions.</p>
<p>If you care about such things, the state with the strongest teacher unions in the U.S. - Massachusetts - also has (last time I looked) the highest TIMSS scores, strong enough to compete with any country in the world.</p>
<p>And the states with the weakest unions? Oklahoma…Arkansas…Louisiana…</p>
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<p>Not sure why parochial schools are being distinguished from other private schools, but according to the source you linked, there are about 600,000 parochial/private school teachers versus 3.2million public school teachers. (clarifying for accuracy)</p>
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<p>That lower pay is more than compensated by being in private schools with much more legal leeway to allow teachers to enforce classroom discipline and if necessary, suspend/expel violently disruptive students. </p>
<p>Due to the regular public school’s mandate to provide education to everyone within a given locality and fears of litigation from parents of violently disruptive students, a public school teacher could end up spending most/all of his/her time trying to deal with one/handful of violently disruptive students. Not to mention the actual real risk of being injured/killed by such students…especially if they’re armed. And due to that mission…such violently disruptive students cannot be suspended/expelled by the school unless they do something serious enough to get themselves sent to JV. </p>
<p>Saw glimpses of all that during my public middle school years. Fortunately, the public magnets operate more like their private counterparts in being able by law to toss out violently disruptive students without as many legal repercussions because such students can always go back to their neighborhood public school.</p>
<p>My guess is the high performance of Mass, public school students (versus Arkansas and Louisiana public school students) has less to do with union strength and more to do with demographic and socio-economic status of the students,comparatively.</p>
<p>"My kids have had quite a few excellent teachers in private schools, where the teachers are not unionized.’</p>
<p>My kid went to private school, also, but it wasn’t because the quality of the teachers in his public school was poor - in fact, he had excellent teachers. And I don’t think his teachers at his private school were better, but the classes were smaller, they didn’t have to teach to stupid tests or follow any curriculum mandates. That, imo, was the big difference and why he was able to achieve so much more.</p>
<p>“Not sure why parochial schools are being distinguished from other private schools, but according to the source you linked, there are about 600,000 parochial/private school teachers versus 3.2million public school teachers. (clarifying for accuracy)”</p>
<p>Because the poster specifically mentioned parochial schools.</p>
<p>I have to say harm, at least based on personal experience. </p>
<p>The high school my kids attend has, for the most part, excellent teachers. However, there are some truly bad teachers there also, and they are protected by the union. The average teacher salary in the district is over $100,000, and yet the union struck last year for MORE money, causing the kids to miss a week of school. It was especially detrimental to seniors, who were trying to get college stuff taken care of and had no idea how long the strike would go on. Parents in the district think that prime college season was chosen by the teachers’ union deliberately for leverage. There are also union policies that are not in the interest of the students. </p>
<p>Maybe you could argue that the union keeps salaries up, therefore attracting better teachers. However, I would argue that, at least in our district, it’s not necessary. This district is easy to teach in - the facilities are top notch, the average student is motivated, the parents are involved (although I’ll concede that some overinvolved parents might be a negative and the expectations of teachers are very high), there are lots of resources, and they are willing to pay for GOOD teachers - so without a union it would be able to attract good teachers without retaining the mediocre or bad ones.</p>
<p>I suspect that the existence of teachers’ unions drives up salaries in parochial and private schools as well; even if many private schools pay less than public schools do, they can’t offer compensation and benefits that are so out of whack that no one with any other options would work there. </p>
<p>Private school teachers may also be in a different boat from public school teachers for a variety of reasons. In a parochial school, teachers who practice the religion in question may consider the school’s affiliation a major plus, or even a necessity, depending on their level of observance. A retired public school teacher can teach a class or two at a private school while still collecting his pension, which, depending on the state, he can’t do if he teaches even one full year class in the public school system. Some private school teachers don’t have teaching degrees, and thus aren’t eligible for other jobs.</p>
<p>^^^^ Sticker, you beat me to it. The demographics of MA and AK are about as far apart as you can get. Snappy answers based on false causation/correlation assumptions make nice headlines but are invalid.</p>
<p>“This district is easy to teach in - the facilities are top notch, the average student is motivated, the parents are involved, there are lots of resources, and they are willing to pay for GOOD teachers - so without a union it would be able to attract good teachers without retaining the mediocre or bad ones.”</p>
<p>That’s great - but what about the inner city schools or in poor rural communities - who would want to go teach in those districts?</p>
<p>“Some private school teachers don’t have teaching degrees, and thus aren’t eligible for other jobs.”</p>
<p>Very few have teaching degrees. A lot have do have their masters in a specific subject and go teach at private schools when the realize that having a masters in English or History or Biology, etc., doesn’t qualify them to teach in the public schools, and they don’t want to, or can’t continue on and get a PhD.</p>
<p>“The demographics of MA and AK are about as far apart as you can get. Snappy answers based on false causation/correlation assumptions make nice headlines but are invalid.”</p>
<p>It is what it is. Are you prepared to make an argument that education in Massachusetts would be better without the teachers unions? If not, then it is your argument that is invalid.</p>
<p>We now have a raft of research on non-unionized charter schools, where they can also cherry-pick students. The results are extremely underwhelming (by the way, I am in favor of them, but NOT because they get better educational results, which they don’t.)</p>
<p>While I don’t think teacher’s unions are the devil, I do think their previously negotiated pensions and sick leave are unrealistically generous and not sustainable, either financially or politically. The end result is that new hires are getting paid less and have less generous benefits than the old timers. The figure of 100K average district salary is misleading because it ignores the fact that a few long-termers are paid a huge salary, while the many new hires are paid much less and will never attain the level of the current mature employees. The era of being able to retire 2 years “early” on the basis of unpaid sick leave, for example, is going to end. Teachers increasingly have to pay a portion of their health insurance, like people in the private sector.</p>
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<p>Parental involvement may not always be cooperative. I know of some well-off school districts where a subset of well-off parents dominate the local school boards as a way to get their own kids better grades/services at the expense of everyone else. </p>
<p>Moreover, what some parents may consider “easy to teach in” may not always necessarily be the case. Children who are well-behaved at home may be hellions in the classroom even in well-off suburban districts. Heard countless accounts of such from relatives and friends who attended/taught in such schools*. </p>
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<li>A great-aunt who decided to do a stint of teaching chem in a leafy LI suburb sometime in the '80s after teaching as a tenured chem Prof for decades. She quit after 1 year saying the students were exceedingly rude and disruptive and their parents felt “their kids could do no wrong”.** Ended up teaching at an academically reputable private school where they had no compunctions about expelling students for the same types of rude disruptive behaviors.<br></li>
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<p>** Granted, part of this was a generational change as classroom disciplinary expectations even for little kids were far more strict back when she started her academic career than it was by the 1980’s.</p>
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<p>Nine of the top ten states have teachers’ unions. The one that does not, Indiana, became a right-to-work state last year.</p>
<p>My youngest’s fifth-grade class had 32 students. In sixth grade they had 33. They had to discontinue offering extra work to the advanced students because of the overwhelming workload of propping up the bottom performers. This, I believe, had a far bigger influence on learning than who negotiated the teacher’s contract.</p>
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<p>A symptom of the LCD teaching mentality/mandate at too many public schools. The opposite extreme of the teach to the top 1/3 or 1/5 at my urban public magnet HS and expecting the rest to keep up or sink.</p>
<p>FWIW, most of the teachers I personally know of that are teaching at parochial schools, are there because they were not able to find teaching jobs at suburban public schools (had they been willing to teach inner city children, they may have had better luck). Their decision had nothing to do with the union. </p>
<p>Public school teachers are having increasing demands placed on them, driven by politicians and corporations who know next to nothing about day-to-day life in a classroom. Teaching now barely resembles teaching twenty years ago - the focus on the students is steadily decreasing, while the data-keeping and administrative work is increasing exponentially…with very little, if any, proof that it’s effective. Most teachers I know will say that they just wish they could be left alone to actually do their jobs, which is to teach kids, not enter information into a computer!</p>
<p>Teaching in a district that is supposedly “easy to teach in” due to educated parents and more resources is usually not so easy either. In these districts, teachers must tread very lightly so that they don’t offend parents. While most parents want a partnership with the teachers in their child’s education, there are a few who believe that their child is more special than the others, and who take up an inordinate amount of time with daily emails/phone calls to the teacher, which can end up bordering on harassment. I have seen the union step in to support an outstanding teacher in a situation like this, where the parents were calling the administration regularly to complain that the teacher was not responding daily (any more, she did at first!) to their ridiculously long emails about their child. And, I have also seen the union refuse to step in when the district took steps to get rid of a teacher who was widely known to be ineffective…so they’re not all bad!</p>
<p>Most, if not all jobs I can think of, require employees to be accountable to patros, as well as to superiors. Which is why I get tired of hearing about poor teachers who must cope with this aspect of their jobs. And they have no risk of reprisal if they just choose to ignore the parents, at least where I live.</p>