In a valiant attempt to defuse the ideological conflicts between the reformist and traditionalist wings of the liberal education wonketariat, Matthew Yglesias argues that this disagreement is not not ideological at all. Rather, it is an artifact of past decisions about educational structure:
Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The
traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having
more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform
view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated
efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it’s really not an ideological debate at all.
I think the only reason it’s taken on an ideological air is that unions
have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general.
But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based
on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran
teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that
system and didn’t want to change to a degree-based system. Because
unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right
ideological atmosphere but it’s all very contingent.
This
is a very interesting thesis, but ultimately I think it’s wrong. There
is a reason that unions kill merit pay, and it’s not because they just
happened to solidify in an era when merit pay was out of fashion.
To
state the obvious, unions negotiate ironclad contracts to cover dozens,
hundreds, or thousands of workers. Once they take effect, those
contracts are rarely renegotiated, and they apply to every single
worker no matter what the situation. So unions are always going to be
looking for the simplest, least subjective metrics by which to measure
their members. Furthermore, they will be looking for metrics which are
not under the control of the other side. The school board cannot
change how many years you have in service, or whether or not you have a
degree. But it can change the curriculum, or the tests.
Obviously,
people who are not in unions write employment contracts, which are
similarly hard to write. But non-union employment contracts operate in
an environment where both sides often hope to continue the relationship
beyond the initial term. This offers quite a bit of good-faith
flexibility, because people who are too rigid about the exact letter of
their contracts are apt to find that their contract isn’t renewed.
Even in contracts with a very definite term, there are reputational
considerations. That’s just not how unions operate, because the union
can’t be fired by the employer. When the contract expires, you’re
going to negotiate another contract. The result is that people in
non-union employment contracts can tolerate quite a bit more ambiguity
on both sides than people in a collective bargaining situation.
The
unhappy corollary of this is that the metrics will not only tend
towards simplicity and ease of measurement; they will also tend to
reward mediocrity. Again, this is not an accident of history. A
collective bargaining unit run by a “majority rules” system is always
going to look for a system that rewards the median or modal worker, not
the best.
A merit pay system can work in one of two ways. It
can benchmark teachers against the average, and reward the people who
achieve the most improvement. Or it can set some minimum standard and
give a bonus to any teacher who bests that standard. (You could set
three tiers, or what have you, but the concept is basically the same).
In
my opinion, the first system is probably going to best maximize
productivity (though this is an interesting discussion for another blog
post). But it would never pass a union vote, because the majority of
teachers wouldn’t benefit from it, and those who did would have to work
harder. The second system might pass. But the union would make heroic
efforts to water down the benchmarks until the majority of their
members were receiving at least some “bonus” pay.
But compare either system to what now exists in our nation’s schools. Every single teacher can stay on for years unless they do something direly wrong. Every single teacher
can get a useless education degree, which basically requires a pulse.
They have a system that spreads benefits absolutely evenly among all
their members.
How would any alternative gather majority
support from the union members? I mean, you can add on resistance to
change, which I think is significant. But even if they were picking a
new system from scratch, the seniority + degrees system is clearly
going to satisfy many more members than either of the merit pay
alternatives. It would probably be the majority choice no matter
what. And of course, over time, teacher’s unions select for the sort
of people who prefer this arrangement to competitive merit pay for one
reason or another
Unions
are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom
55%. That’s how they work everywhere–in schools, and out. That’s how they have to work. No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.
