Let's Stop Blaming Teacher Unions
March 12, 2010
BEN LEVIN, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy. University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)
A lot of education rhetoric these days includes mention of the supposedly negative impact of teacher unions on reform. For a few commentators, eliminating union opposition is one of the most essential, or even the single most important component in creating improvement, while for many others it is part of the package.
But here’s an interesting observation. Virtually all the top performing countries on international education measures have strong teacher unions, including Finland, Korea, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. Of course such a relationship does not imply causation, but it does suggest that there is no necessary conflict between strong teacher unions and good outcomes. Moreover, some countries or sub-national units that took steps to weaken the influence of their unions did not demonstrate any subsequent improvements and in some cases, such as England, later had to take many measures to improve the situation of teachers to get an adequate supply and thus to improve student results.
There are good logical grounds for thinking a positive relationship might exist. There is virtually unanimous agreement that the quality of teaching is among the most important factors in shaping education outcomes. It stands to reason that good teaching depends on attracting and retaining talented people in the profession. Strong unions play a vital role in ensuring that teachers are reasonably paid, and perhaps even more importantly that they have reasonable working conditions; the evidence shows that teachers are highly motivated by working conditions such as good leadership and opportunity to learn.
Of course not all the positions or policies of teacher unions are consistent with strengthening public education. Some unions find it hard to move past industrial thinking to consider what it means to be a union for a profession, which raises the question of how to embrace a high standard of professional practice in what is, after all, a mass occupation with hundreds of thousands of people.
Two related aspects of this challenge seem most significant. The first is the knowledge base for professional practice. To what extent can or should teaching be an occupation in which the profession itself expects that all members will use accepted practices, in the same way that engineers learn accepted ways to calculate forces or nurses learn common ways to do take a patient history? This is currently quite far from what happens in education, where practice standards tend to be general and vague, and it is assumed that teaching practice can and even should vary greatly from one class or school to another.
The second challenge has to do with supporting professional learning. Many teachers are inveterate learners, but the content and organization of professional development has long been criticized by almost all parties, including teachers, principals and experts. It is vital to find better ways of organizing and supporting professional learning that are supported by teachers while also contributing to improving schooling.
Teacher unions that took on these two challenges in a positive way could make an important contribution. Meanwhile the rest of us should recognize the important positive role teacher unions have played and can continue to play in building strong and effective education systems.
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