Unionized School Districts Have Better Teachers

Teachers unions get a really hard time these days from both politicians and taxpayers. The unions are resented for being able to provide great retirement benefits that used to be the norm for all workers but are no longer available to most of us. And they get bashed for inefficiency and excessive overhead but that is probably more to do with political malfunction and the failure of the local school boards as opposed to the unions themselves. And they have also been accused of protecting bad teachers at the expense of our children. But a recent report by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that unionized school districts actually dismiss more poor teachers and retain higher quality teachers than non-unionized districts. Eunice Han, the study’s author, says, “Highly unionized districts dismiss more bad teachers because it costs more to keep them. Using three different kinds of survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics, I confirmed that unionized districts dismiss more low-quality teachers than those with weak unions or no unions. Unionized districts also retain more high-quality teachers relative to district with weak unionism. No matter how and when I measured unionism I found that unions lowered teacher attrition.”

Of course, this study has implications not only for those states that are restricting the collective bargaining power of teachers unions but also for the charter school movement. Of course, neither restricting bargaining power or the charter school movement have much to do with actually teaching our children. They are methods to reduce the power of unions, reduce teachers’ salaries, and privatize the public sphere. But this study shows that, if you really care about the education your children are getting, you should want a strong teachers union in your school.