Study praises union teacher contracts for improving education
But UIUC-ILEPI report also faults Illinois for poor state funding
Teachers on strike walk a picket line at Chicago International Charter School in early 2019. (Wikimedia Commons/Charles Edward Miller)
By Ted Cox
A new study praises the range and flexibility of union teacher contracts for improving education across Illinois, even as it faults the state for being last in the nation in percentage of local school funding.
“Bargaining for Innovation: An Analysis of Collective Bargaining Agreements in Illinois Public School Districts” was published Monday as a joint effort of the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute. It generally lauds contracts negotiated by teacher unions under collective bargaining agreements for tailoring education to the needs of specific areas and the students who live there.
“There is substantial variation in working conditions, innovation, and flexibility across Illinois’s school districts,” said University of Illinois Professor Robert Bruno, director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal. “The fact is that a majority of districts have flexibility for teachers and district administrators to make the best decisions for students, demonstrating that contracts negotiated by teachers’ unions are not as rigid as they’re often portrayed.”
“Collective bargaining agreements are like constitutions for local school districts, allowing workplace decisions to be made jointly by teachers and the district’s administration,” said ILEPI Midwest Researcher Jill Gigstad, a co-author. “As a result, public schools are among the most democratic workplaces in Illinois, and no two CBAs are exactly the same.”
“The needs of rural Illinois are very different from the needs of inner-city Illinois,” said Kathi Griffin, president of the Illinois Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union. She added that teachers and their unions know the needs of their districts as well as anyone — as recognized by a vast majority of state residents polled last year in IEA’s report on “The State of Education” — and increasingly fight for better learning conditions in their contract negotiations, such as limiting class sizes.
“As educators, our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” Griffin said. “When you have unions, it means our students receive a better public education.”
“As educators, our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. When you have unions, it means our students receive a better public education.”
IEA President Kathi Griffin (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
The report draws from about two-thirds of the teacher contracts across the state, praising the general innovation and flexibility of the CBAs on nine topics: school-improvement days, planning periods, professional learning committees, district leadership teams, class-size maximums, intra-district reassignment, academic freedom, procedures to deal with parental concerns, and memoranda of understanding. It finds that 87 percent of districts have planning periods for teachers to prepare for instruction, and 46 percent have professional learning committees that encourage teacher collaboration. In total, 74 percent of Illinois’ school districts had a moderate-to-high degree of workplace flexibility.
While Griffin pointed out that few districts pay for their teachers to go back to school — a commonplace practice at private corporations — the contracts do generally make allowances for teachers to do so on their own, with incentives in salary for those holding advanced degrees. As a result, she added, “We have the best-educated teachers in the country,” with the study finding that almost all Illinois teachers have a bachelor’s degree — 99 percent — and that 58 percent also have at least one master’s degree.
“In addition,” according to a news release on the study, “55 percent of all school-district CBAs reimburse teachers for the cost of professional-development training, and 59 percent stipulate a number of ‘institute days,’ typically four days per year, to provide training on new techniques and new technologies.”
Calling that an example of “social capital,” Griffin said institute days and time set aside, by contract, for lesson planning enhance “the benefit of collaboration.” She added, “It’s all about the relationships, the connectivity,” and a “respect for everyday sharing.” Those who ultimately benefit from that collaboration among educators are, of course, the students.
Gigstad agreed. “Professional-development activities, institute days, and similar items in school district CBAs all help teachers implement the best educational practices for their students,” she said. “These contract provisions directly improve educational-achievement outcomes for students.”
“Oftentimes, you put planned time in a contract to make sure that it is guaranteed,” Griffin said, but with the study showing that the average district teacher contract lasts 3.1 years that also shows the need for memoranda of understanding — tweaks made to the contract and agreed upon by teachers and administrators.
“Honestly, they all should live by their contract,” Griffin said. “You can’t just put words on paper. You have to show through your actions and behavior that that is a contract you respect and that you respect the people whose contract that is.” MOUs, she added, are evidence of that.
“Going on strike and negotiating a new contract aren’t the only ways to bring about change,” said ILEPI Policy Director Frank Manzo IV, the study’s other co-author. “Many districts have memoranda of understanding, which allow districts and teachers the ability to modify their CBAs and address subject matters as they come up. Twenty-seven percent of districts in Illinois have at least one memorandum of understanding.”
But the study also points out that many district contracts are trying to make the best of a bad situation, due to the state’s insufficient share of funding. It cites how Illinois ranks last among the 50 states in the state’s percentage of local education funding, at just 24 percent.
“Our most underfunded schools are in areas of poverty, because their housing is low” in value, Griffin said, offering little leeway in drawing on more property taxes. “They don’t have the resources,” she added.
That’s no doubt contributed to the study’s findings that, as of the 2015-16 school year, just 23.6 percent of the state’s almost 120,000 teachers were male, but they made more on average: $67,000 to $64,000, with the overall average teacher salary being $64,485. African Americans made up just 5.6 percent of teachers, with Hispanics just 5.8 percent.
Griffin explained that part of that “unfortunate” pay inequity is historic, dating from the days when it was commonly thought that women in teaching were augmenting household income with a “second salary,” but that men also more often teach in middle school and high school, drawing larger salaries that are often enhanced if they’re coaches. As for minority teachers, previous studies have shown that minority students have an interest in teaching, but can’t afford to go into the field because of the low pay.
Since 2016, however, that has been changing, thanks to the evidence-based funding formula adopted by the General Assembly in 2017, which is still having an effect on education statewide. “With evidence-based funding, we’re really trying to turn the Titanic, quite honestly,” Griffin said. She added that the $40,000 minimum teacher salary, passed by the General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Pritzker last year, should also help with minority recruitment.
Of course, key to increasing the state’s share of the cost of public education is the fair tax proposed by Pritzker, which goes before voters in the fall needing a 60 percent majority to amend the state constitution. The study points out: “The state of Illinois has one of the most regressive education funding systems in the country. Due to years of underfunding by state lawmakers, local property taxes are the primary source of revenue for Illinois’s public schools. Across the nation, states provide on average 46 percent of the funding for public schools, and local sources comprise 45 percent of school funding, while the federal government accounts for the remaining 9 percent. School funding is skewed towards local sources in Illinois, with property taxes comprising 63 percent of all elementary and secondary education revenue and the state government only covering 24 percent. Consequently, Illinois ranks 50th in the nation in the percentage of public school revenues coming from the state.”
It cited that low-income and middle-class residents pay a significantly higher percentage of their incomes in property taxes than do wealthy residents: “According to Illinois Department of Revenue data, working-class homeowners paid 10 percent of their incomes in property taxes on average, while those with annual incomes over $500,000 paid 2 percent or less towards property taxes.”
A graduated income tax — which is expected to add more than $3 billion in state revenue, paid by the top 3 percent of wage earners making more than $250,000 — would allow the state to increase its share of education funding and thus potentially provide property-tax relief. As Griffin put it: “Fair is not always equal.”
Until the fair tax passes, however, union teacher contracts are doing the job to tailor education to local needs, the study states. “Every year, more than 3,800 public schools across Illinois educate more than 2 million children,” Bruno said. “The innovation and flexibility that are produced in collective bargaining agreements demonstrate that the process of collective bargaining remains a great way to ensure that students are receiving the best possible education to prepare them for college, for careers, and for successful lives as informed U.S. citizens.”
“Unions mean our students receive a better public education,” Griffin said. “If you have a union in your district, your kids are going to do better.”